SIA Standards Roadmap 2.0 - Security Industry Association

Background
SIA has been developing standards for the security industry since the late 1980s, initially to fulfill an
industry need for standardized communications between alarm systems and monitoring stations.
In the following decade, the SIA Standards Committee developed numerous successful communication
standards, (such as the CP-01 False Alarm Reduction standard released initially in 1994) to
mitigate the false alarm problem that had plagued the industry. In 2001, responding to the imminent
convergence of security and IT, SIA Standards launched a new program called OSIPS (Open,
System Integration, and Performance Standards). The OSIPS initiative was to be the underpinning
of a strategic plan to bring increased relevance to and extract market impact from SIA Standards in
the face of the changing electronic physical security landscape. The OSIPS initiative was tasked with
developing a family of open standards that would enable the interchange of information between
security system components and both security and non-security systems. In addition, the family of
standards would include standard measures of component performance.
In the past decade, with OSIPS as a primary focus, the SIA Standards Committee has created
subject-oriented working groups to author and publish a number of standards for ANSI accreditation.
As a result, OSIPS received federal government endorsement, which signaled to the security
industry at large that interoperability is a shared business value for the entire community.
In 2006, with ANSI considerations in mind, the SIA Standards Committee separated from the SIA
Board of Directors, giving it autonomy to elect leadership, form subcommittees and working groups,
and set strategic direction independent of the board or SIA membership. The new charter of the SIA
Standards Committee was then codified in the SIA Standards Roadmap, dated March 14, 2007. This
“Roadmap 1.0” described the goals and technical context of the revised OSIPS initiative in detail.
While high-level goals may not have changed significantly since the publication of Roadmap 1.0,
industry context certainly has. Most notably, we have seen the emergence of many other standards
organizations — both inside the security industry and beyond. These new bodies are defining relationships
among technologies that barely existed when our charter was first developed. Roadmap
2.0 aims to address these landscape changes.