There is a question that sounds almost too simple for a professional conference: what is a standard, actually? Not in a formal, definitional sense. In a practical one. What is it that a standards organization produces and hands to the world? 

The instinctive answer is a document. A carefully structured, rigorously reviewed document. The result of months or years of expert deliberation, national body consultation, and consensus-building. A PDF, ultimately. 

But a PDF is not what standards organizations actually create. It is what they publish. What they create is knowledge. Precise, shared, authoritative knowledge about how things should work, what terms mean, which requirements apply, and why. The PDF is just one way of packaging that knowledge for delivery. And increasingly, it is not the most useful way. 

This distinction sits at the heart of what structured authoring means for standards development. And it has consequences that go far beyond how documents are edited. 

This post is based on the session delivered by Colin O’Neil (EBCONT America) and Maarten van Vulpen (Fonto / RWS) at the SES Annual Meeting 2026. Colin O’Neil leads EBCONT America’s practice. Maarten van Vulpen is Customer Success Manager at Fonto / RWS Group. Ebcont customizes and implements the Fonto Editor for multiple global SDOs. 

The hidden cost of the document model 

Every secretariat professional in the room at SES recognized the scenario immediately: a drafting cycle approaches its end, and the real work begins. Tracked changes from a dozen national body submissions need to be reconciled. Ballot comments reference page numbers that shifted in the last revision. A final compliance check against the Directives Part 2 runs through the document like a quality gate that arrives too late to be painless. 

These are not inefficiencies in how people work. They are the structural costs of treating a formatted document as the center of gravity for a complex, distributed, multi-year knowledge-building process. Every step that was actually about capturing meaning, about reaching agreement on what a requirement should say and why, is surrounded by overhead generated by the format itself. 

When the format is no longer the organizing principle, that overhead largely disappears. The rules that currently govern compliance review become built into the authoring environment. Structural consistency is enforced as content is written, not checked after. National body contributions arrive in a form that can be compared and merged systematically rather than reconciled manually. 

This is not a technical argument. It is an operational one. The time freed from document management is time returned to the work that actually matters: substantive deliberation, expert judgment, and consensus. 

Writing standards without the overhead 

One concern that arises whenever structured authoring is discussed is entirely understandable: if the content is being produced in a structured format, do contributors need to understand that format? Do editors need to think in terms of schemas? Do reviewers need to learn a new system before they can do their work? 

The answer, in a well-designed implementation, is no. This is where the experience from ISO and IEC’s Online Standards Development platform is instructive. The experts using it are not technical authors or XML specialists. They are the same committee members who have always written standards, domain experts whose value lies in what they know about the subject, not in how they format a document. 

What they encounter is a familiar writing interface. They type. They structure content using recognizable labels: clause, requirement, note, example. Presented the way a word processor would present a heading or a paragraph. The platform guides what is allowed at each point, which means it also prevents the errors that currently require late-stage correction. Formatting is not something contributors manage; it is something the system handles automatically. 

The result, in the words of participants in the OSD program, is striking in its simplicity: “Super tool to use even for a non-editor, super friendly to play with the document, interactive. It will help a lot all experts writing our standards.” Another: “Very simple to write in the document in compliance with the structure. What a time-saver!” 

These are not reactions to a sophisticated technical system. They are reactions to a system that successfully got out of the way, that let people focus entirely on the quality and precision of what they were writing, rather than on the mechanics of how it was being written. 

Reviewers benefit from the same principle. Commenting, tracking proposed changes, and resolving ballot input all happen in the same environment, against the same structured content. There is no translation step between what was written and what is being reviewed. The version of record is always current, always consistent, and always auditable. 

What content looks like when it is enriched 

The shift to structured authoring is often described in terms of what it removes: the formatting work, the post-hoc compliance checking, the PDF-as-source-of-truth. But the more important story is what it adds. 

When content is structured at the element level, every provision, term, note, and requirement becomes individually identifiable. It can be tagged with meaning. Not just its position in a document hierarchy, but what kind of content it is, what it relates to, what obligation it expresses. A requirement is not just text that follows a heading. It is an object with a type, a scope, a relationship to the terms it uses and the provisions it cross-references. 

This enrichment, adding semantic tags and connecting content to shared taxonomies and terminologies, is what transforms a standard from a document into a knowledge resource. 

Consider what becomes possible. A compliance engineer can ask which requirements apply to a specific product type and receive a governed, precise answer. Not a list of search results to interpret, but the actual provisions that apply, surfaced because they were tagged as such. A regulator integrating standards into a digital framework can pull specific content directly rather than re-entering it. An organization managing a portfolio of related standards can trace the impact of a terminology change across every document that uses that term. Automatically, reliably, before any revision is published. 

None of this requires the reader to understand how the content was structured. It just works. The intelligence is in the content itself. 

More voices, more easily 

There is a dimension to this transition that does not get enough attention: structured authoring is, in a meaningful sense, a more inclusive way to develop standards. 

The traditional document-centric process has always favoured insiders. Knowing how to navigate a complex Word template, understanding the unwritten conventions of a particular TC’s drafting culture, being able to interpret ambiguous formatting as structural signal. These are skills that experienced participants accumulate over time. They are not relevant to whether someone has expertise worth contributing. But they affect whether that expertise can be contributed effectively. 

A browser-based, guided authoring environment changes this. The structure is expressed through a familiar interface. The rules are enforced by the platform rather than memorized by the user. A new committee member from a smaller national body, an expert contributing in a language that is not their first, a technical specialist who has never participated in formal standards work before. All of them face a lower threshold. The process guides them rather than requiring them to already know the way. 

At SES this year, the point came up repeatedly from different directions: online tools reduce travel and time barriers; modern interfaces lower expertise barriers; clearer, more transparent workflows reduce the informal advantage that accrues to experienced insiders. These are not marginal gains. They address some of the most persistent structural challenges in broadening participation in standards development. 

When the process is easier to navigate, more experts can contribute effectively. And more diverse expert contribution produces better standards. 

From publication to operational intelligence 

The endpoint of this shift is not a better document. It is not even a faster document. It is something qualitatively different: standards content that functions as operational intelligence. Available to the systems, platforms, and workflows where decisions actually get made. 

Today, a standard is consumed at the end of a long chain. Someone reads it, interprets it, extracts what is relevant, and applies it. Each step in that chain introduces delay, interpretation risk, and the possibility that the committee’s original intent gets diluted. 

When a standard is built as structured, enriched content, those steps collapse. Requirements can flow directly into compliance management systems. Terms can be queried against a shared terminology base. A change in one provision can propagate, with human oversight, to every downstream artifact that depends on it. The standards body remains the authoritative source, but the knowledge it produces reaches users in a form they can actually work with, at the point where they need it. 

This is the real opportunity: standards that are not just authoritative, but actively useful in a world where decisions are made by people using digital tools and, increasingly, by the tools themselves. 

The transition Is already underway 

ISO and IEC have made their position clear. New deliverables default to structured authoring since January 2025. The governance decisions at the top of both organizations reflect a strategic judgment that this direction is not optional. It is where standards development is going, because it is where the world that uses standards is already. 

For standards organizations working through what this means for them, the most important insight from the SES session is also the simplest: this is not primarily a technology project. The tooling is mature. The authoring experience works. The patterns are proven across large expert communities. 

What determines whether an organization navigates this well is whether it treats the transition as operational modernization, a change in how it works and what it produces, rather than a software upgrade. The organizations that succeed bring their editorial teams and committee members along from the beginning. They are honest about the change management involved. And they keep the strategic objective in front of them: not to produce documents faster, but to make the knowledge inside those documents more useful, more accessible, and more durable. 

The future of standards development is collaborative, structured, and machine-readable. The question for every standards organization is how to get there in a way that strengthens participation, continuity, and trust.