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Organization The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) is the forum of choice for information technology developers, producers and users for the creation and maintenance of formal de jure IT standards. INCITS is accredited by, and operates under rules approved by, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). These rules are designed to ensure that voluntary standards are developed by the consensus of directly and materially affected interests.

INCITS is sponsored by the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a trade association representing the leading U.S. providers of information technology products and services. ITI members employ more than one million people in the United States and in 2000, their revenues exceeded $668 billion worldwide.

Mission To promote the effective use of Information and Communication Technology through standardization in a way that balances the interests of all stakeholders and increases the global competitiveness of the member organizations.
Accreditation INCITS was founded as Accredited Standards Committee X3 in 1961. The last accreditation was April 19, 2001 under the name INCITS.
Headquarters ITI
1250 Eye St NW, Suite 200
Washington, DC 20005
Web site http://www.INCITS.org/
Standards Store http://www.incits.org
Telephone 202-737-8888
Chairman Karen Higginbottom of Hewlett Packard is the Chair. She is the Director of Standards Initiatives in the Chief Technology Office of HP's Computing Systems Organization.

Since 1994, she has managed HP's involvement in standards and consortia organizations, where she has been active since 1987. Prior to joining HP, she led the Standards and Consortia team at Apple Computer.
INCITS Contacts

Jennifer Garner, Director of Standards Programs
Lynn Barra, Director of Standards Operations

Membership 1700 organizations from 13 countries
Technical Work

From the beginning, X3 standards were the infrastructure standards for information interchange and interoperability. One of the earliest standards is ANSI/NCITS X3.4-1986(R1997), Information Processing--Coded Character Sets--7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-bit ASCII), which specifies a set of 128 characters (control characters and graphics characters such as letters, digits, and symbols) with their coded representation.

One of the latest standards is NCITS 347-2001, BIOS Enhanced Disk Drive Services (EDD). This standard describes services currently in use on IA-32 and IA-64 architecture personal computer systems. These services are provided by BIOS firmware to support hard disks up to 16 mega-tera-bytes (16x10 18 ). This standard also provides BIOS level services for determining the relationship between BIOS device numbers and the physical mass storage devices attached to the personal computer. The services defined in this standard can be applied to mass storage devices with ATA, ATAPI, SCSI, USB, Fibre Channel, 1394, I2 O, and other interfaces.
History From 1961 - 1996, INCITS was known as Accredited Standards Committee X3, Information Technology. It was established within a year of ISO TC 97 and ECMA as the U.S standards committee for information technology. X3 was accredited by ANSI and it was sponsored in 1961 by ITI, a trade association then known as the Computer and Business Equipment Asssociation (CBEMA). CBEMA was a forum for companies to identify and discuss areas of common concern, and its sponsorship of X3 provided a place for the providers of information technology and systems to receive feedback from users, government agencies, academia and other interested parties. Today, ITI members employ more than one million people in the United States and in 2000, their revenues exceeded $668 billion worldwide.