At the time of its formation, the mandate of JTC 1 was to develop base standards in information technology upon which other technical committees could build.
[2] In its first 15 years, JTC 1 brought about many standards in the information technology sector, including standards in the fields of multimedia (such as MPEG), IC cards (or "smart cards"), ICT security, programming languages, and character sets (such as the Universal Character Set).
[2][3] In the early 2000s, the organization expanded its standards development into fields such as security and authentication, bandwidth/connection management, storage and data management, software and systems engineering, service protocols, portable computing devices, and certain societal aspects such as data protection and cultural and linguistic adaptability.
As technologies converge, JTC 1 acts as a system integrator, especially in areas of standardization in which many consortia and forums are active.
[9] After Higginbottom's nine-year term expired in 2017, Mr. Phil Wennblom of Intel was elected as chair at the JTC 1 Plenary meeting in Vladivostok, Russia.
[13] The liaison relationships established directly at the JTC 1 level are:[citation needed] Most work on the development of standards is done by subcommittees (SCs), each of which deals with a particular field.