The governance of ISO’s technical work centers on the Technical Management Board (TMB), which operates under the authority of the ISO Council. The TMB is responsible for the overall management and strategic oversight of ISO’s technical activities, ensuring the development of international standards is well-coordinated, transparent, and aligns with the organization’s goals.
Specifically, the TMB’s duties include:
Establishing ISO’s various technical committees (TCs) and approving their titles, scopes, and work programs.
Appointing Chairs for technical committees and project committees, and supervising their leadership.
Allocating or reallocating secretariats of technical committees and subcommittees.
Ratifying the establishment or dissolution of subcommittees.
Assigning priorities to items of technical work when needed.
Coordinating technical work, including managing cross-sectoral or overlapping subjects by assigning responsibility where appropriate.
Maintaining and updating the ISO/IEC Directives, which are the procedural rules guiding international standards development.
Monitoring performance and progress of technical committees, facilitating continuous improvement in the process.
The TMB issues regular communiqués to inform ISO members and experts about developments in technical policy and procedural matters.
An essential aspect of ISO’s technical governance involves adherence to key policies such as the Global Relevance Policy, which ensures standards are designed for broad applicability across industries and countries worldwide. ISO also has a unified patent policy jointly maintained with IEC and ITU, supporting clarity on intellectual property issues in standardization.
Participants in ISO technical work are expected to follow the ISO Code of Ethics and Conduct, which promotes integrity, impartiality, and respect throughout the standards development process.
Leadership within the technical committees is provided by Chairs and Committee Managers. Chairs are appointed by the TMB (for TCs and project committees) or by parent committees (for subcommittees) and serve terms typically capped at six years, extendable up to nine years. Their chief role is to facilitate consensus and maintain neutrality—they cannot represent national interests in their chairing capacity. Committee Managers, designated by the Secretariat member body, handle administrative duties impartially, ensuring smooth operation of committee activities.
Together, these governance structures maintain the integrity, effectiveness, and global relevance of ISO’s standards development, ensuring that diverse expert input is harmonized into widely accepted, consensus-based international standards.