Since the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing was completed, work in ISO in this area has concentrated on the definition of a number of supporting standards to add detail to the basic framework. Taken together, these provide a powerful structure for the support of large federated systems and provide a basis for the enhancement of tools for the development and maintenance of large middleware systems. This paper describes the main features of the new work and speculates on how it can be applied to augment the tools used to design and manage such systems, and, by so doing, can increase their flexibility.