What happens when independent bodies start to act like practitioners?
Within the world of maintenance and reliability practitioners there are a great number of independent bodies, often professional societies but sometimes fully fledged private companies also.
These include standards bodies such a the ISO, British Standards, SAE and IEEE; publishers and promoters such as Plant Services and ReliabilityWeb, and national institutions like the Institute of Asset Management in the UK, AMC in Australia and SMRP in the USA.
That is all well and good, the discipline needs independent professional bodies for regulation, establishing leading / common practices and for promoting their interests on the national / political stage. Particularly given our unique responsibilities for safety, productivity and environmental integrity. (note the emphasis on independence)
But what happens when the line gets blurred. What happens when these cross over from one area into another.
Within the three areas of oversight, promotion and professional networking it doesn't seem to matter too much.
For example, the SMRP or IAM / AMC run annual conferences. These could be sen as encroaching on the publishers / promoters turf and are usually great forums due to the professional memberships these institutes boast.
Likewise publishers, ReliabilityWeb in particular, have taken to creating Professional Networking groups. Again they generally do a good job at it because of the wide readership they command.
In yet another example we often see institutes supporting the creation and publication of standards as so famously happened with PAS55, a collaboration between the IAM and British Standards.
But what happens when they cross over into (dare I say it) the dark side? Where the practitioners operate? What happens when independent bodies start to compete with consultants for client revenues?
The unfair influence of the Church over the State ! (Dramatic isn't it?)
If a company wants to provide, say, auditing or certification services for an internationally (or national) standard, then there is a predetermined way to do this.
Within Australia the standard is AS/NZS ISO 19011:2003 and I am sure there are equivalent standards in the USA.
Establishing compliance by a certifying body (Lloyd's Register for example) means that you are compliant with a standards saying you have the processes and whatever else is required to certify companies against specific standards.
The only other element is whether the market believes you are competent to do so or not, having proven your neutrality in the matter. And this is how it should be.
The SAE does not authorize companies to certify their standards, such as SAE JA 1011. And to the best of my knowledge neither does Standards Australia, or British Standards Group.
Why not? Because they would be picking winners. This would compromise their independence, and enter them into the game as the adjudicators of who should be able to provide commercial services in these areas.
These companies can audit against our methods, these ones cannot. If they operated this way then a decision by a standards producing body could mean the death knell for Bureau Veritas or Lloyd's Register. As well as determining the business models for countless small to medium sized service companies.
And fortunately, extremely ethically, they do not do this.
...generally.
PAS 55 is a very strange creature indeed. A specification, adopted in many areas as a standard, published by British Standards and sponsored by the Institute of Asset Management.
Yet the IAM offer an authorised Assessor and authorised Trainer program. Effectively handing them control over the entire global market for certification to PAS 55, and for a price of course.
This places it in the position of dictating which consulting firms can and cannot deliver training and certification to the British Standards document. merely by entering this market in this way, with their well publicised involvement with the PAS 55 process, they have used their privileged position to ensure they get their cut of every certification and training activity out there on this standard.
And because they are the IAM, there would be very few certifying and auditing companies that could go against them.
Hard to argue that this non-profit remains truly independent isn't it?
And there's more...
What about software? The American Petroleum Institute provides software for managing API compliant RBI. Pitting it against other, commercial providers such as TWI, Meridium and RBMI from Lloyd's Register Capstone.
Hard to see this institute as truly independent either is it? They have used their privileged position to enter a market, pushing out those who are commercially active there under their own steam.
Then there is ReliabilitWeb which continually confuses me. If you go to their website today you will see a range of training courses offered out of their facilities, with no credits given to any third party training provider.
Does this mean they are now providers of training services to the Maintenance and Reliability disciplines? This would place them squarely as competitors to The Marshal Institute, The New Standard Institute and Life Cycle Cost Engineering to name a few.
How then can they any credibility as an independent publisher within the field, if they have a horse in the race?
it raises all sorts of questions and I would be very interested in knowing if anybody out there knows anything more about this.
This has really gone too far and is threatening the integrity of our managerial discipline. We really need to push back against these independent bodies to ensure that they remain independent, and are not using their privileged positions to place themselves at the front of others within the field.
I think that the stakes are simply too great.
Your thoughts?