innovation and interoperability

Mention standards, and many eyes glaze over - too hard, too long, not good. I'd ask you to rethink this.

It is important to understand that much of our rapid innovation has come from building on top of standard approaches! If you look at the applications on the Internet (Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, and 1000 more), they all took advantage of TCP/IP, HTML and other standards that allowed for the amazing global growth of the internet.

So take a look at what you can adopt and adapt into your processes that might make for a giant leap forward - building on the shoulder of giants and rapidly emerging, new standard ways of doing things. A good example is QR codes - 2 dimensional bar codes that can hold much more information than a traditional bar code and be read by the newest generation of phones - Iphone, Android, and others.

If you are using interoperable data and standards as a footing, your speed willl pick up as well - others are doing the work for you and allowing more linkages, more outside applications, and better understanding.