Historical evolution of norms, standards and legislation in BCM

Before the expected ISO 22301 will be published and, probably, will be the reference standard world wide, its convenient to make a revision of the set of guides and standards that nowadays shows the way in Business Continuity.

The first standards that can be remembered is the  NIST 800-34 "Contingency Planning Guide for IT" from US government. This is the standard in which some terms and definitions begins to be used, and this terms had endured over time. This are DRP, COOP, BCP, etc. This standard were published in 2002 and, without any doubt, were the first statement of intent in the IT Service continuity.

At the same time, the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) published the first version of the Good Practice Guide (GPG) which would be later become the seed of the BS25999 standard. It was more focused in Business continuity that the 800-34. BSi decided in 2003 used as a base to develop the standard, publishing the PAS-56 (Publicly Available Specification). This PAS was in force until the publication of BS-25999-1 that repeal the PAS in 2006. At the same time, the standard BS-25999-2 was launched, with the description of the management system and the certification schema.
Standards developers organizations from Singapore and Australia has been traditionally aware about business continuity and had published different norms and standards, that complete the "occidental" standards. Singapore, for example, published the SS507 BC/DR Service Providers that looks for define the characteristics that providers has to met in other to be certificated as a BC provider. During a while, this standard was considered as a rival of BS-25999 in their fight to establish the base of the new ISO standard, but it was not very used in other countries.

In 2006 was published the PAS-77 standard by BSi. It was focused in covering the IT Service that in  was not taken into account in BS-25999 and was primarily motivated by the criticism. In 2008 this standard become BS-25777 IT Service Continuity Management and in 2011 was became in ISO 27031, although it's not expected that this standard would had a certification schema in in the future. It's important to advice that the committee in charge of the development of this standard is 27 (IT) and not 22 (Social Security).
In the following picture it can be seen a timeline that could clarify this scenarios of norms and standards:

Hope the 22301 will become in the definitely standard that give a boost to the business continuity sector from a certification perspective.