A further rationale for the concurrent efforts has been the recognition that creating high quality news and multimedia information services to deliver on the NII has to be a rigorous and time consuming task which can not happen overnight or adapt quickly to instantaneous technology changes. Therefore, the NMIS Project has facilitated the early availability of services from a variety of providers by explicitly supporting their development and delivery of prototype services while the rest of the components of the system were evolving, rather than waiting for the technologies, infrastructure, standards and policy to fall into place. The relative differences between a traditional "pipelined" approach and the "concurrent" approach is illustrated in Figure 1 below [3].

Finally, the concurrent approach also improved the overall quality of the rest of the system by allowing service providers to provide active feedback to network technology and infrastructure developments as they happen rather than after the fact.