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. The project began with funding from the National Science Foundation's Digital Society and Technology Program (Award Numbers: 0231584, 0233634, and 0323961). New work extending early mortgage industry findings to other industries is now underway with new funding from NSF's Human Centered Computing program awarded in the fall of 2007 (Collaborative Research: Interorganizational Information Systems Integration Through Industry-wide IS Standardization: Technical Design Choices and Collective Action Dilemmas (NSF award numbers: 0704629, 0704978, 0705186). [More...]

Research questions cluster into four broad areas including those related to developing the standard, implementing the standard, diffusing the standard. Key questions include:

1. How does the collective approach taken by a VIS consortium influence the technical design choices embodied in the standard as well as the industry's ability to complete the development of a standard?
2. How do specific design choices made by VIS standards consortia influence the future likelihood that they will be implemented in software and adopted by end users?
3. How do technical implementation choices by vendors and users influence the extent to which standards-based systems diffuse throughout an industry?

KEY FINDINGS

• The development of industry-wide information system standards are subject to a number of collective action dilemmas
• The technical choices in the design of the standards can promote consensus about the design of the standards but also discourage adoption and depress the level of benefits achieved by the standards.
• The potential benefits of standards for small organizations are highly dependent on whether and how the standards are implemented in both large and small organizations. [More...]