Adopter-Centric Perspective

The focus of this research is to identify the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of data-exchange standards. Chapter Five identified these factors from an innovationcentric viewpoint, and the purpose of this chapter is to establish the factors that are relevant from an adopter-centric approach. This approach focuses on the adoption of an innovation, in this case standards, within an organization. The chosen organization for this research is the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). However, in order to limit some of bias of adopter-centric studies identified by West (1999), this chapter not only focuses on the adoption of an ISO data-exchange standard within the MoD, but also looks at the adoption of a regional and UK national defence standard. It is hoped that by comparing the adoptionof an ISO standard with a regional standard and national standard, a better distinction can be made between the factors that are unique to the adoption of an ISO data-exchange standard, and those that are common to the adoption of any standard or innovation within the MoD.

Research Philosophy and Strategy

Chapter 2 highlighted both the critical need for data-exchange standards and the current limit of empirical research in the adoption of information technology standards and more specifically data-exchange standards such as STEP. These two issues were key motivations for this research. Therefore, to achieve the aims of this research, a qualitative approach was used to support the exploratory and descriptive nature of the research. This chapter discusses the justifications for the overall research philosophy and approach subscribed to, and the multiple data collection and data analysis activities used to collect sufficient data to answer the study’s research questions.

Adopter-Centric Checklist Application

Standardization is the key to ensuring the interoperability, quality, safety, reliability, maintainability, effectiveness and efficiency of the equipment used by the Armed Forces (UK MoD SSE, 2005a). To realise these benefits, standards have to be effectively adopted and implemented within the MoD. However, what emerged in Chapter Six was that there are a number of factors and barriers critical to the adoption of standards within the MoD. Some factors like organization culture are applicable to the adoption of any standard or innovation within the MoD. However, other factors like standardization policies, standard characteristics and support from the standards community are unique to a particular standard.

Innovation-Centric Checklist Application

PLCS (Product Life Cycle Support) was one of the motivations behind this research and triggered the research question into the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of data-exchange standards. A review of the literature showed that there was a gap within the SC4 community with regards to the factors critical to the adoption of the standards and there was a need for more empirical studies in IT standards adoption research. In light of this, a novel combined innovation- and adopter-centric approach was taken to establish the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of data-exchange standards. By carrying out this analysis, steps can be identified that will help to facilitate the adoption of PLCS. On a more general level, this chapter will predominately demonstrate the applicability of the ‘Adoption Checklist’ as a tool for stakeholders and decision makers involved in the adoption and diffusion of data-exchange standards such as PLCS.

IT Standards Adoption and Diffusion Models

The motivation behind this research is to identify the factors that impact the adoption of data-exchange standards, such as STEP. Research into the adoption of STEP and other standards produced by ISO/TC184/SC4, which is the ISO technical committee responsible for the development of STEP, is very limited. Currently there are only two specific empirical studies (Dreverman, 2005; Meister, 2004) that shed light on the factors associated with the adoption of ISO/TC184/SC4 (referred to as SC4 for the remainder of the chapter) standards like STEP. This means that practitioners devoted to the ongoing development and use of these standards, and academics, still lack a significant body of evidence regarding the factors and barriers critical to their adoption.

Benefits, Classifications and Research Surrounding Standardization and IT Standards

Standards have been in existence since the beginning of recorded history. One of the earliest indications of a standard is the beginning of written alphabets by the Egyptians and Babylonians around 4000 BC (Krechmer, 1996). Another example of early standards effort is the work done by Shih Huang-Ti, the founder of the Chinese Empire, under whose reign the Great Wall was built. He enforced one law, one weight, and one measure to rule out discord and confusion between petty states. The standards proposed by the Chinese Emperor were used only for the construction of the Great Wall and are no longer used today, but the testament of his efforts are still seen today. (Perry, 1955 as cited in Deshpande & Nazemetz, 2003a) The term “standard” has multiple definitions. Indeed the Oxford English dictionary offers up to thirty different definitions of the word “standard” (OED Online, 2005). However, a commonly cited definition is one offered by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which defines a standard as: “A document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body, that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines, or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context” (ISO/IEC, 1996). Although this definition sheds light on what a standard is, it does not give an indication of the multiple dimensions of a standard. These additional dimensions relate to issues like how a standard is developed, when a standard is developed and why a standard emerges. The remainder of this section addresses some of these dimensions by looking at the standardization process, the benefits of standardization and the classification of standards.

General Introduction

A study commissioned by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that ISO 10303, the Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP), has the potential to reduce mitigation and avoidance interoperability costs in the aerospace, automotive and shipbuilding industries by approximately $928 million (2001$) a year (Gallaher, O’connor, & Phelps, 2002). Studies like these show the benefits and importance of using data-exchange standards to enable technical and business information to be shared electronically throughout an extended manufacturing enterprise (Ray & Jones, 2006). The literature surrounding these data-exchange standards indicates that a fairly large corpus of information is available with regards to the history, practical implementation and benefits ofdata-exchange standards like STEP (Kemmerer, 1999). However, a further review of the literature shows that there is very limited empirical research into the factors that impact the adoption of data-exchange standards. This means that practitioners devoted to the ongoing development and use of standards like STEP, and academics, still lack a significant body of evidence regarding the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of these standards. The research reported in this book seeks to address this gap by developing conceptual models for data-exchange standards adoption, which are tested through a series of qualitative case studies and action research. This chapter begins by giving an overview of the emergence and development of product data-exchange standards like STEP and the rationale behind the research presented. Following on from that is an overview of current work and research relating to the adoption of STEP. The aim, objectives and scope of this research are then stated.

Emergent Innovation-Centric and Adopter-Centric Checklists

Data-exchange standards adoption research is important to both the SC4 community and the IT standards research community. Chapter Five and Six presented case studies of four standards to assess the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of standards. Two models were developed and these models sought to shed light on the relationships between factors and barriers critical to the adoption of dataexchange standards. However, as part of this research it was deemed important to develop two novel standards ‘Adoption Checklists’ from both an innovation- and adopter-centric point of view. The purpose of these checklists is to act as a frame of reference to support the decision-making process in the development and adoption of new and emerging data-exchange standards. The checklists are a series of ques-tions that can be used to assess the adoptability of a data-exchange standard. The checklists have been developed so that positive answers to the series of questions indicate that a standard is more likely to be adopted. In addition, these checklists act as a foundation for the action research into the adoption of PLCS, which is detailed in Chapters Eight and Nine. This chapter begins by chronicling the development of the innovation-centric ‘Adoption Checklist’. Following on from that is the development of the adopter-centric ‘Adoption Checklist.’ The final section summaries and concludes this chapter.

Innovation-Centric Perspective

The standardization process and the success and failure of standards takes place in complex socio-technical settings that are shaped by a variety of factors and a multitude of actors (Gerst et al., 2005). The research reported in this book seeks to establish these factors in relation to the adoption and diffusion of data-exchange standards. Chapter 2 identified that there was a need to investigate the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of data-exchange standards to fill gaps within both the ISO/TC184/SC4 community and the research community for IT-standards adoption. Chapter 3 then introduced the novel approach of taking both an innovation-centric and adopter-centric view to address the research question, and chronicled the development of two conceptual models that capture the key factors to be researched. Following on from that, Chapter 4 went on to discuss the justifications for the interpretivist philosophy, qualitative approach and case study research strategy subscribed to for this phase of the research. Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to verify and examine the validity of the factors identified in the original innovation-centric model. The remainder of this introduction section gives an overview of the data collection and analysis processes that has been used in this chapter, and gives a brief overview of the ISO sub-committee responsible for the development of the two case study standards and concludes with a brief introduction to the chosen standards.

Summary and Recommendations

The benefits of standardization are realised through the effective adoption, implementation and use of standards. Nonetheless, there are a cross-section of factors that impact the adoption and diffusion of standards. Indeed, within the IT standards research community, there is a research area devoted to looking at IT standards adoption. However, there are currently a limited number of peer-reviewed, empirical studies that look at the adoption of IT standards. One particular set of IT standards where this is true is ISO data-exchange standards, particularly those produced by the ISO subcommittee ISO/TC184/SC4, and to date there are only two known studies that have looked at the adoption of the 614 standards published by the SC4 subcommittee.