"Standards move too slowly for our regulatory timeline"

Traditional standards development takes years. The SCI specification — widely celebrated as moving at unprecedented speed — still took over three years from inception to ISO certification. By the time specifications reach final form, regulations have evolved, technology has shifted, and the window for influence has narrowed. The bottleneck is not technical complexity. It is the challenge of coordinating dozens of stakeholders with competing priorities, different terminologies, and divergent views on scope, accuracy, and implementation.

The problem was becoming urgent. The EU Green Digital Coalition, the NY Corporate Climate Accountability Act, and evolving GHG Protocol guidance were all creating pressure for organisations to report on digital sustainability. A standard that arrived two years too late would be a standard nobody adopted.

The human-in-the-loop approach made objections visible and resolvable — a deliberate decision gate rather than the traditional model of circulating documents and hoping for feedback. What had been an opaque social process became an explicit technical one.