Over the years, a great deal of effort has gone into designing, building, and testing autonomous vehicles. Along the way, much effort has also gone into ensuring that public policy provides the proper support and constraints, and that terminology and definitions become standardized. All of these efforts have yielded value that can be applied outside of the autonomous vehicle space, but it is the work on terminology and definitions that was most useful to our efforts.

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has done a great deal of work on terminology and definitions, resulting in the following document: SAE Taxonomy and Definitions for Terms Related to Driving Automation Systems for On-Road Motor Vehicles (J3016).

The latest version can be found here: https://www.sae.org/standards/content/j3016_202104/

While exploring autonomous operations for the data center, we saw the work that SAE had done to establish an industry wide taxonomy for Automated Driving Systems (ADS) and felt something similar was required in the world of IT Operations. In IT there are too many nuances in the definition of autonomous operations and lack of a recognized standard. Given our place as the industry leading infrastructure provider we have an obligation to bring clarity to the market.