Over the past few years I have been watching the development of various corporate sustainability reporting initiatives such as GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) and financial industry indexes such as Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes. Recently the Prince of Wales has weighed in on the issue with the development of an initiative to promote something call Integrated Reporting.

I have been trying to assess whether the criteria used in these newer measures of performance are on a path to eclipse the ISO standards or if the ISO standards will become an important part of these reporting and indexing products especially the assurance parts. I sometimes wonder if a parallel assessment process with its own set of performance criteria is coming that will make the ISO standards obsolete and with it the certification body accreditation process IAF and ISO certification business.

What are your thoughts? Is ISO gaining credibility as a measure of an organizations performance or are the common myths we hear about ISO so deeply entrenched and stakeholder confidence eroded to the point that the world is likely to seek other methods to assess organizations performance rather than ISO and IAF.