Primary Sources
Answer
Standards, Governance, and Certification
A standard defines what trustworthy AI requires. Governance is the institutional work of adopting and operationalizing that standard inside a specific organization. Certification is the credential that lets a third party trust the result without redoing the verification themselves. TTIC works across all three: it authors and contributes to standards, builds the governance chain that operationalizes them, and is developing certification pathways on top of that work.
Why It Matters
Three different jobs
Conflating these three is a common failure mode: an organization can hold a standard and still have no governance, or have governance and still have no way to prove it to a third party without redoing the work. Keeping the three distinct is what makes each one actually deliverable.
How It Works
Where each stage feeds the next
Standards (IEEE/UL 2933 TIPPSS, ANSI/HSI 2800:2025) define the requirement. Governance is the five-stage chain: Standards, Institutional Adoption, Operationalization, Evidence, Accountability. The Evidence stage is what certification would ultimately draw on: a defensible, independently verifiable record rather than a self-attestation.
Evidence and Examples
Certification-adjacent mechanisms already in use
HSCC's Model Contract Language for Medtech Cybersecurity (MC2) is a certification-adjacent mechanism already in production: it requires supplier attestation against a list of standards that includes IEEE/UL 2933. Praxen's independent behavioral verification and Observra's runtime telemetry are the evidentiary layer a certification pathway would rely on.
TTIC's Role
Standards, governance, and the bridge to certification
TTIC serves as the adoption and operationalization vehicle for translating TIPPSS into practical governance, diligence, and certification pathways.
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- Published by
- Trustworthy Technology & Innovation Consortium (TTIC)
- Author
- By Sherri Douville, Founder & Chair, Trustworthy Technology & Innovation Consortium (TTIC)
- Originally published
- Last updated
Provenance: This resource is an original practitioner architecture from the Trustworthy Technology & Innovation Consortium (TTIC), developed to operationalize healthcare AI governance standards into institutional practice. External standards and source materials are cited separately.
Cite this resource
Sherri Douville. “What Is the Relationship Between Standards, Governance, and Certification?.” Trustworthy Technology & Innovation Consortium (TTIC), 2026. https://trustworthytechnologyinnovation.com/answers/standards-governance-and-certification/.