Why do we need technology standards? What are the specific objectives of standards and how do they relate to a dynamic ICT marketplace?
Interoperability. One of the recurring challenges in the ICT environments of today – mixed environments that typically use lots of technologies from lots of vendors – is the need for those technologies to work better together, or interoperate. ICT standards are among the many tools that can help achieve interoperability. They do this by establishing conventions – standards – that provide a common interface or format for the technologies that need to work together. That’s the nature of an interoperability standard; by definition, it requires the buy-in of many companies who then implement the standard so that their ICT offerings interoperate with those of other companies, including competitors. This principle applies to the digital technologies of today. There are many examples of voluntary standards in the ICT sector: Bluetooth, for example, is an open standard for short-range radio frequency (RF) communication. While the Bluetooth specification was first developed by Ericsson, it was
