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The only ways to do more with less are for you and your organization to be more productive with existing resources or to find low-cost ways to tap into other people and resources that you don’t need to employ, own, or acquire. Standards organizations working on key elements relating to electronic systems design are a great, low-cost way to tap into the resources of other individuals, companies, and organizations. By using relatively small investments in time and resources, you can multiply your investment many fold. Take for example Denali Software’s experience in working with the PCI-SIG on the evolving PCIe specification. Denali joined this group very early in its development and helped to guide and review the first version 1.0 specification and subsequent iterations. The obvious benefit to this approach is to become one of the specification insiders. Working within a standards group, you get the inside scoop and can hear about what’s in the pipeline, what’s working, and what’s not working. You are also able to provide real-time feedback to the specification’s working group if you discover that the specification is headed for trouble based on your parallel internal development efforts. In this way, you both learn firsthand about the design tradeoffs driving the specification’s creation, experience that will cost your organization dearly if you must do it all yourself, and you provide your own guidance to the specification development team. This two-way interaction helps to steer the specification around hidden rocks discovered early in the specification’s developments. Those are rocks that your future competition may well discover later, to their great disadvantage. Better that you know and avoid them now. That’s certainly one way to do more with less.
Working within standards groups also taps into the expanded reach of all members working on the specification and taps into the already established and growing ecosystem that forms around any successful standard or specification. Your competition, if it is not participating in the development of the specification, does not learn these things and later will have to expend time and resources, sometimes substantial amounts of time and resources, to catch up with the pack. You are also able to more quickly form relationships with the major players in the ecosystem. Relationships that you establish early in the development of the specification can connect you and your organization to invaluable sources of expert assistance and even prospects for your new product. These are huge advantages for your organization if you plan to introduce a new product into the market based on an evolving standard.
So look at participation in standards organizations as a leveraged opportunity with multiple dimensions. Of course there are the technical aspects. You get information on the specification and technical details far more quickly than non-members and, because you’ve been involved early in the process, you will far better understand why the specification is written in certain ways. These technical details help you develop related products more quickly than can competitors who merely download, read, and then try to implement the specification. You also will realize substantial advantages from the business-development and marketing perspectives because your work on the specification will naturally put you in close contact with the key players—often the major players—in the growing ecosystem surrounding the specification. By turning these connections into strong bonds, you place substantial distance between your organization and the competition. As the specification starts to be adopted, the marketing efforts of each group member reinforce and multiply the efforts of the other members. These strategic positions help your sales and marketing teams do more with less as well. In short, working on specifications within standards organizations vastly multiplies your investment by tapping into the much greater resources of the specification’s working group and, ultimately, its ecosystem.
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Posted under Xuropa
When I was a participant in the SPIRIT Consortium as a delegate from Mentor Graphics, I was a monitor on the SystemRDL standardization effort that was driven by Denali (I wasn’t a user, and the technology was new to me). As Steve pointed out, the standard (which was formerly Yet Another Proprietary Solution) benefited from the added resources of other perspectives. We had a couple of industry consultants as active participants, as well as users/customers. That additional input saw the standard include alterations from the original technology contribution and came out stronger for it, probably ahead of where it would have been as a proprietary solution.