With a global market and a distributed work environment, an organisation can today more freely choose which collaboration partners to hook up with. Making the collaboration a success depends to a great extent on the degree to which the organisations can interoperate. Using standards for enabling interoperability is a common approach to overcome the disperse and varying nature of, for example, applications. This paper elaborates on two facts influencing standards during their development and enhancement, focusing on both what to influence and how. Results show a variety of issues to clarify and take into consideration when determining in what way standards development should be influenced.