Guiding Principles Collaborate with appropriate industry groups. Focus on enabling technologies, not on commercial products. NIST must collaborate as a partner with appropriate industry groups, rather than with specific vendors, in order to foster the widest possible interoperability among products and services within the communications and computer industry. By focussing on enabling technologies, such as protocols, data formats, and algorithms, NIST can provide the widest possible benefit to the industry, while still allowing room for vendors to distinguish their own products within the marketplace. In addition, NIST can avoid being viewed as a proponent of commercial products from any specific suppliers.
Goals Improve the quality of industry specifications.
Expedite the delivery of requisite enabling technologies. Enhance the interoperability among next-generation networking products and services. Improved quality among relevant industry specifications leads to increased user satisfaction when deploying products based on those specifications. The resulting products should exhibit increased reliability and known levels of performance. Expediting the delivery of requisite enabling technologies allows vendors to offer related products sooner than might otherwise be expected and enables users of those products to reap any benefits sooner.