Standardisation is considered very important and necessary to push EI forward, but industry is hesitant to support the effort. Vendors are still waiting to provide better, more integrated, applications to support EI users. Research in ICT is moving in the direction of more interoperability of components and distributed control. There must exist a common or compati-ble infrastructure. There is also a need for loosely coupled distributed systems.
Systems are too rigid and too costly.
A more feasible approach may be a bottom up permissive rather than a top-down proscriptive one. The goal is moving as fast as culture, technology, systems, etc. With current usage trends we are moving away from integration, not toward it e.g. PCs versus mainframes. We don't treat human resources at all or at least not properly. Standards are the basis for consensus and allow to manage interaction semantics.