By now many of you have purchased the Draft International Standard version of ISO 9001:2015, and noticed it has come festooned with a strange watermark on every page, reading “interim working draft.” This has caused a lot of confusion, as this mark has never appeared on a DIS before. Is this a DIS or a working draft (WD)?
When I first purchased it, it was on the very first day it was made available, so I assumed ISO had uploaded the wrong version and accidentally made it for sale. Seems this is not the case. My sources on TC 176 in the US said this reflected at least one version that was circulated amongst them, and this was later confirmed with a source in the UK.
Writing to ISO itself produced this cryptic response from their Customer Service department, who had to do some research before finding the quasi-answer:
I was told that this information was normal as this draft is the copy sent by the TC 176/SC 2 secretary to other committees in liaison. It is therefore a liaison document and not the standard draft documents we usually sell.
Hmm. Whatever.
The final answer has to do with the rushed timeline, as ISO careens towards its final publication date of 2015 for the approved, released IS (international standard) version. Because to date the drafts have been controversial, the amount of comments received from the various working and committee drafts outweighed the resources within TC 176 to process and disposition them. At the last TC 176 meeting in Paris, they simply ran out of time, leaving a hefty percentage of the comments un-processed. A small team was then assigned to handle the remainder, offline and after the meeting.
The comments should have triggered a short delay by ISO, and a moving of the final publication date, but as we have already seen, ISO is not going to move that date unless a meteor destroys the planet first. In order to get the DIS published on time (well, a few months late, at least) ISO bypassed its normal procedure to have a 2-month translation period take place before submitting the DIS for public review and voting, and instead is conducting the translation and public review concurrently, to ensure the three-month voting period can begin in July 2014. This gives an automatic edge to English-speaking countries, while those where English is not spoken will be still translating the document well into the voting period. If a particular member nation is not on top of their translation activities, it could even mean a nation will have to vote on a document that is not in their native tongue.
But back to that watermark. In order to get the document in the hands of the public (and to get a few Swiss Francs rolling into the ISO coffers), ISO had to publish the DIS as is. There was not even time to coordinate a proper-looking, or fully vetted, version. So TC 176 submitted the document they had, which had the watermark still on it from their internal distribution. Once it was made available, there was no going back.
So if you do have a document with a weird watermark, fear not, it’s the right version. And, yes, there’s software out there that will remove the damn thing. Or so I’m told.
(This article was updated on 29 May to clarify the timeline regarding translation of the DIS.)
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
