New IEEE SA Interactive Standards Help Boost Productivity and Reduce Errors

There is a growing need for new ways to access and work with technical standards, so that they can be applied faster, more productively and with fewer errors to satisfy today’s demanding operational and enterprise requirements.

One way the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) is making this possible is by offering selected standards in an optional new interactive flipbook format, with navigation, notes and bookmark functionality. Artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements are also available as a further option.

These interactive derivatives of existing IEEE standards open up a much richer, more flexible and collaborative user experience for all of a project’s stakeholders, versus the static PDF format traditionally used for standards documents.

Right now, the new IEEE SA Interactive Standards (IS) platform offers about 40 popular IEEE standards in the areas of communications, empathic technology, power & energy, and software & systems.

The ultimate goals are to enhance the IS platform’s capabilities with greater AI and other functionality, and to extend the format across IEEE SA’s entire standards portfolio.

The IS interactive platform is just one of several different ways IEEE SA is making its standards offerings more accessible and useful to wider audiences, a key goal as industrial, consumer, regulatory and other requirements continue to evolve globally.

The IS platform improves overall productivity because it leads to faster design times, product rollouts and project completions, and because it makes understanding and meeting safety and compliance requirements easier and faster as well.

For example, users can quickly search for specific information within a standard; retrieve the relevant information; cross-reference it; post questions and answers about it; and share all of that with the entire project team.

That’s especially important in cases when a project has characteristics or idiosyncrasies which will impact the implementation of a standard’s specifications and procedures. By enabling team members to quickly identify and share relevant information in various user-friendly ways, the IS platform enables the data and practices described in a standard to be integrated with operational systems much more dynamically, and therefore faster.

The IS platform’s flipbook functionality offers users exceptional ease of navigation and many productivity-boosting features. Among others, they include:

• an interactive Table of Contents
• hot links allowing users to easily move between sections/pages
• the ability to insert cache-based notes, and to create unlimited bookmarks
• as content is developed, it can be added to an active standard
• any standard can be replaced with the newest version
• embedded slide shows, image galleries and pop-up images can be easily inserted and directly accessed
• multimedia and interactive content also can be viewed and streamed directly from the standard, including audio files via Spotify
• analytics

Future iterations of the new IEEE SA IS flipbook format will incorporate many different content types to help users understand how the standard was developed, why decisions were made and what are their potential impacts.

These content types may include such things as panel discussions, industry feedback/commentary on the standard, demonstrations/animations, and links to websites, standards or other resources such as training courses and certifications.

To see a list of the IEEE SA standards currently available in the interactive flipbook format, visit the IEEE SA Interactive Standards (IS) platform page on the IEEE SA website.

To purchase these and other standards, visit IEEE Xplore^®.

For questions, please contact Matt Herdlein.

Author: Matt Herdlein – Director of Product Management, IEEE Standards Association