Standards are a poorly understood tool in the Information Technology industry. When managed effectively, standards can provide for significant market growth, encourage customer investment, avoid government regulatory intervention, and provide for innovation. Companies that recognize this can gain significant visibility as industry leaders from their proactive role in standards work. You can use this approach in your organization, however few persons have the background or experience in making this work.
Effective standardization entails both a strong engineering and marketing component.
As the work moves forward, it must be actively promoted into the communities that it can benefit. This takes vision, effective communication, engaging the press and consultant community, and ultimately delivering the standard. While at Charles River Data Systems, we built a marketing campaign with standards leadership as one key component. We promoted the standards and established credibility as industry spokespersons. The result was a channel into the press, consultants, and major customer opportunities that would never have existed without that leadership investment.