How mature are certification organizations and their offerings and how adaptable are they to big technology changes?
Lecturer: Rike Sandlin
Rivervista Partners LLC
info@rivervistapartners.com
769-218-9825
Highlights:
• ISOs have been around for decades and their structure for changes is strong, taking several years.
• R2 has developed a stable process to go through change, guided by ANSI requirements.
• E-Stewards is mature, nimble, and makes good changes.
• Enterprises usually engage third-party audit firms or IT security teams to manage risk and pursue best practices in IT equipment disposal.
Rike’s assessment:
As we think about the ISOs, of course those are very mature. They’ve been around for decades, and they have a very strong structure for how they change those standards and how they roll out those changes. Changes do not happen every year, they take several years. That’s similar to the way that R2 has evolved and they’re at a point now where it’s very stable, that they’ll go through a change process every few years that’s governed by their own requirements tied in with the ANSI requirements and so forth. E-Stewards, as I mentioned, is a bit nimbler, but again they’re mature organization, with a mature set of governance people that are involved. And so, I have confidence that, even though they’re nimbler and more able to make changes, I think the changes they make are typically good and so I think that’s positive. From an enterprise perspective, there’s very little that says an enterprise must follow a particular certification program. Rather what this gets into is at risk management organization within the enterprise, whether it’s a third-party audit firm like one of the large accounting firms that they that look at risk throughout the enterprise, whether it’s an IT security requirement, whether it’s a sustainability program or ESG program where they really want to make sure that the IT group is also involved in pursuing best practices. Typically, it’s one of these other parties that are pushing for better governance of the IT equipment and IT disposal. But it’s not a very specific requirement typically.
