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.
TopInnovation-Centric ‘Adoption Checklist’
In the innovation-centric approach, the unit of analysis was the data-exchange standard. Figure 1 is a top-level diagram of the main factors that directly impact the adoption of the two data-exchange standards studied in Chapter Five.
Figure 1. High level view of innovation-centric factors
Figure 6 in Chapter 5 outlined four main categories that contain the factors that impact the adoption and diffusion of data-exchange standards. These four categories are: Conception, Standards Process, Standard Specifications, and Adoption conduciveness. The eleven factors displayed in Figure 1 fall into these four categories as follows:
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Conception: Initiators of development.
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Standards process: End-user involvement and software vendor involvement.
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Standards specifications: Standards DOI characteristics, completeness of the entire standard, brand identification and IPR.
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Adoption conduciveness: Adopting community innovativeness, communication channels, marketing, and related implementation technologies.
The categories represent the sections that will be used to develop the questions that will be part of the innovation-centric ‘Adoption Checklist’. Apart from the conception category, the questions in the checklist are based only on the factors that directly impact the adoption of a standard, shown in Figure 1.