​Geneva, Switzerland, 2 October 2014

Opening Address

Ladies and gentlemen
Friends and colleagues,

It is a great pleasure to be with you at the opening of this your 25th meeting. Let me take the opportunity to mention a few of the activities in ITU-T, which might be of particular relevance to your work.

There are many standards bodies, but what makes ITU’s standardization work unique is its development dimension. The inclusivity of the ITU-T standards process, and the fact that many of our standards help policy makers implement WSIS outcomes, is I believe our greatest contribution to the fulfilment of the objectives embodied in the WSIS Action Lines. ITU-T’s strength lies in the public-private partnership of its members, its openness to others to join our work, and willingness to collaborate with other organizations. As ICTs become every more prevalent in other industry sectors, ITU needs to forge new relationships with organizations and entities that have had no traditional relationship with ITU, and I believe this is particularly important for the ITU-T Sector.

Fortunately we have an excellent tool to encourage this: Focus Groups. These groups are established to address new areas of work that require collaboration and cooperation with entities that are not ITU members. Participation is open to all free of charge including non-members on an equal footing. They have proved very useful in generating a momentum for new activities that can be fed into the relevant study groups, including into the study groups of the other two Sectors. One example is our Focus Group on Innovations, which in cooperation with ITU-D, looks for examples of ICT innovations, particularly from developing countries, and identifies their potential for standardization. Particular focus is on the socioeconomic impact of the innovation and how to facilitate its implementation.

Increasing the participation of developing countries in ITU’s standardization work is the objective of the Bridging the Standardization Gap (BSG) programme and thanks to the efforts of our colleagues in TSB and BDT this has proved to be very successful, over 40 developing ountries have joined our work since 2007. One tool we have found very effective is the Regional Study groups. There are now several of these and we have grouped them into regions on a new ITU-T global portal.

The Academia membership has been particularly successful in ITU-T with 59 universities having joined and many now quite active in our study groups. The Kaleidoscope academic conferences were initiated in 2008 and the sixth in the series was held last June at the Bonch-Bruevich Saint-Petersburg State University of Telecommunications bringing together a wide range of universities, industry and research institutions. The aim is to identify emerging developments in ICTs and the future need for standardization. Selected papers are published in the Conference Proceedings and in IEEE Xplore. The best papers are evaluated for publication in the IEEE Communications Magazine and other international journals. Prizes totalling $10,000 are awarded to the three best papers.

Our Academia members also contribute to TSB’s Technology Watch function, which surveys emerging technologies and how they might be included in the ITU-T work programme. TSB has produced 28 Technology Watch Reports that provide an up-to-date assessment of new technologies in a language that is accessible to non-specialists, assessing their impact on both developed and developing countries, and the need for work in ITU-T. All the reports are available for downloading free of charge from the ITU-T website.

Two of these reports relate to mobile money, which brings me to mention one of our newest Focus Groups led by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on 'digital financial services'. The Focus Group will develop a standardization roadmap for interoperable digital financial services as well as a regulatory toolkit to help national policymakers and regulators encourage their adoption. 

Another major programme of particular importance to developing countries is the conformance and interoperability programme, which addresses the crucial issue of non-conforming and poor quality products entering the market – especially in developing countries. The programme has gained the support of key players in the field, and with Council’s endorsement of the Action Plan for its implementation, it is growing into a service of great value to our membership, driven again by close collaboration between BDT and TSB.

ITU-T’s security work is closely related to the WSIS action lines. Close collaboration with a wide range of organizations involved in this work is essential and I was pleased that we had so many participated with us in last month’s workshop, the output of which was forwarded both to the ITU-T and ITU-D study groups for consideration.

The WSIS process places emphasis on measurable targets, and measurable progress, and so to conclude I thought to mention an example of this in our work. ITU-T has developed a series of methodologies to assess the environmental impact of ICTs and their potential to reduce GHG emissions and energy consumption in other industry sectors. These methodologies were developed in collaboration in particular with the UNFCCC, UNEP, UNESCO, ETSI and EU. And last week I had the pleasure of opening the fourth ITU Green Standards Week in Beijing. The event concluded with a Call to Action on ‘Setting the Vision for smart Sustainable Cities’, which among other things, urges ITU to develop a set of Key Performance Indicators to measure the success of the integration of ‘smart’ technologies in city infrastructures and operations.

So I hope this has given you a flavour of the efforts being made in ITU-T to address the objectives of the WSIS Action Lines.

Thank you and I wish you a most productive and enjoyable meeting.