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Project Overview

This project involves a comparative empirical analysis of the development, adoption, implementation, and diffusion of vertical (or industry-wide) information system standards in different industries. We aim to contribute to knowledge about IT-enabled interorganizational collaboration, which has consequences for national productivity improvement. This work is motivated by the potential opportunities of Internet-based XML standards, which promise to lower the costs of interorganizational collaboration significantly. Achieving these gains, however, will depend on 1) the successful development of higher-level Internet-based interorganizational coordination standards, 2) widespread adoption of these standards by both large and small organizations in specific vertical industries, and 3) appropriate technical choices by these industry participants during implementation of the standards.

Standards development, adoption, and implementation are challenging processes and collective (often at the industry-level) activities. Because an interorganizational interconnection standard must harmonize the activities of many different organizations, no one organization can develop a successful standard for all others: Representatives of all interdependent organizational segments must join in. The extent to which a vertical information system standard diffuses in an industry is also a collective phenomenon, because individual organizations base their adoption choices on what other organizations do.

The actual adoption and implementation of standards, however, are organization-level activities, leading to complex interactions between individual organizational decisions and collective processes and outcomes. Certain technical choices during standards development can make it easier to gain consensus and successful development of an industry-wide standard, while simultaneously making organization-level adoption and effective implementation of the standard less likely to occur—for example, by failing to account for the incentives of commercial software developers. Our aim is to better understand how these processes interact in shaping vertical information system standards creation and use.

A number of papers are now available from the VISTA Project.

Project History

This project began with funding from the National Science Foundation's Digital Society and Technology Program (Award Numbers: 0231584, 0233634, and 0323961). Early work focused on the home mortgage industry, including a detailed case study of the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization (MISMO). Research activities involved case studies and interviews with industry professionals, a review of literature, analysis of company literature and Web use, and review of available statistical data on the mortgage sector. Collectively, these efforts were oriented towards identifying how emerging uses of the Internet for all facets of the home mortgage industry value chain have influenced the structure and activities of industry participants. Topics include the impact of ecommerce on market structure at different mortgage industry segments such as loan origination, servicing and sales to the secondary market, the evolution of IT standards in the mortgage industry, the use and impact of the Internet in various customer-facing activities, and the impact of industry-level IT standards on mortgage industry practices, performance and structure. New work extending early mortgage industry findings to other industries is now underway with new funding from NSF.

Principal Investigators

M. Lynne Markus of Bentley College
Charles Steinfield of Michigan State University
Rolf Wigand of the University of Arkansas, Little Rock