Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

It’s all a lot easier when the business people have fewer technical choices.

Standards are supposed to reduce many of those choices. But how do you get everyone to conform to a technical standard? It helps a lot if there’s an 800-pound gorilla in the game–an IBM, a Microsoft, a Wal-Mart–that’s so big other players are dragged along in its wake. Then there’s a single de facto standard for everyone to conform to.

Otherwise, there are official standards created by multivendor committees that meet for years in identical hotel ballrooms. Those standards tend to have so many options and variations that there’s no guarantee any two “standardized” products will work together.

But there are ways of forcing standards to actually reduce choices. The most useful tool: shame. The most useful way of going about it: a “connectathon,” like the ones Sun Microsystems sponsored starting in 1986 to make sure all the products that implemented its Network File System would work together. Sun’s solution was to lock all the vendors in a big hall–er, invite all the vendors into a big hall–and then have them connect their machines to a single network and test how well they worked together.

If something didn’t work, it all happened out in front of competitors. It’s amazing how well shame–and fear of the competition–works to encourage interoperability.

Network products have been tested with connectathons for 25 years. The electronic healthcare records crowd finally turned to a connectathon a few years ago, when it became clear there was no other way to get the fiercely competitive and incompatible vendors to interoperate.

Connectathons work. They should be used a lot more; for example, an RFID connectathon might have cut years and billions off the time and cost of implementing tags.

Of course, not all interoperability is technical. A connectathon might not be able to get telcos to work together effectively on mobile payment, simply because the people who really need to be connected with them in the virtual hall–the retailers–haven’t been invited to the party. At least not yet.

But if everyone is at least on the same solid technical ground, an awful lot of finger pointing vanishes because the technology all (mostly) just works.

And business people have a lot less risk of putting themselves out of business.