BS 8888: 2011

We (that is committee TDW/4/8 at BSI) have recently finished putting the final touches to the next revision of BS 8888. With the new revision, why have tried to do something significantly different with the standard, which we hope will make it much more useful for industry.

BS 8888 first appeared in the year 2000, when BSI withdrew BS 308 and adopted the ISO system of standards for technical specification.

The ISO system for technical specification is documented in a large number of ISO standards (probably around 250 in total).  At present this is like a large, disorganised technical library, consisting of numerous documents from different authors with very different styles of writing.  Some documents provide a broad overview of a large area of technical specification, while others go into minute detail in a very specialised topic.  Some documents deal with specific manufacturing processes, such as casting and forging, while others deal with general topics such as dimensioning or drawing views.  Some documents have overlapping content, and in many cases, you would have to use two or three documents together to properly understand a particular topic.

ISO are making some efforts to bring structure and organisation to this collection of standards, but this is a slow process, and will take many years.

BS 8888 was introduced to help engineers work with the ISO system, and initially did so by providing an index, along with some additional commentary to help explain some topics.

With the new revision of BS 8888 we are taking this a step further.  There were two fundamental reasons behind our approach to the new revision:

• Industry has in many cases found BS 8888 unsatisfactory to work with, because they expected BS 8888 to be a replacement for BS 308, and to contain the same level of information.  Some poor marketing from BSI early on encouraged this misperception, and the subsequent disappointment felt by many who purchased the standard.
• The ISO system is difficult to work with because of the way in which it is spread over a wide range of different standards, which are interrelated, but often in a fairly haphazard manner.

Our aim within the technical committee has been to use BS 8888 as a vehicle to address both of these problems.

In order to make the ISO system more accessible, we have taken the core content of a number of key ISO standards, such as ISO 1101 and ISO 5459, and incorporated it directly into BS 8888.  In this way, we intend to make the essential elements of the ISO system available together within a single document.

In order to make the ISO system more useable, we plan to use BS 8888 as a filter.  We will include the main elements of the ISO system, which are relevant to most users, but screen out some of the more specialised aspects of the ISO system, which would have very little relevance to most engineers (and would only tend to confuse matters).  BS 8888 will continue to index and reference all these ISO standards, but the aim is to maintain a central body of content which provides access to the fundamental elements of the system.

The 2011 revision of BS 8888 is currently scheduled for publication in December.  It is not perfect, but we hope that does mark a significant step forward in terms of the usability of both BS 8888 itself and the ISO system.

I will lay out some of our plans for the further development of this standard in a future post.