Organizational Decisions for I.T. Standards Adoption: Antecedents and Consequences

This paper examines the adoption decisions for I.T. standards made in three types of large U.S. organizations, using a series of depth interviews. The study relates prior research on standards competition and organizational adoption to technological structuration theories. Preliminary findings show how scarcity of human capital and the variance in external coupling drive standards decisions, and also highlight the role of ideology in interpreting and enacting standards decisions. This exploratory study examines adoption decisions made by organizations for information technology product compatibility standards. Such strategic decisions constrain the future purchasing and operation decisions of the organization’s I.T. staff. These decisions also directly impact the dayto-day work of most office workers, whether by changing their work environment, imposing unanticipated productivity losses or offering new skills that increase job mobility. Although this study is explicitly theory-creating, it builds on existing research on related topics. The study of standards creation and adoption has been a fertile area of economic research, but prior research has rarely examined adoption decisions directly, treating them as a black box for aggregate-level outcomes. Examining standards in an organizational setting necessarily entails understanding the antecedents to technology adoption and product purchase decisions, which naturally include more general issues of power an authority within the organization. Meanwhile, some research has suggested possible consequences of technology adoption, both in internal outcomes such as the structure of work, and external outcomes such as organizational performance. The paper first reviews the prior research on standards adoption, as well as organizational studies that relate to the possible antecedents and consequences of such adoption decisions. It then describes an exploratory study of I.T. decisionmakers in large U.S. organizations, which examines the adoption process as both an outcome and a mediator. I. STANDARDS ADOPTION IN AN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT One of the largest and fastest-growing areas of organization spending is in the area of information technology products and services. A large proportion of those I.T. products are based on de facto product compatibility standards. Thus, the adoption of standardized products is of managerial interest not only to the thousands of firms worldwide that produce such standards-related products, but also the countless organizations that are current or potential users of such products. A. Diffusion and Adoption of Product Standards A crucial dynamic in I.T. industries is the role played by de facto product compatibility standards [11: 224]. Prior research has developed four related theories to explain such standards: asymmetric switching costs, positive network externalities, path dependence of standards adoption, and increasing returns to scale [2, 13, 17, 28]. The combined implication is that the standards selection choices made by individuals or organizations constrain their own future product choices, and the choices made by the overall population constrain the choices of other members. B. Antecedents of Organizational Decisions to Adopt Technology There are two research streams that directly relate to an organization’s decision to adopt a new technology standard. One is the general study of organizational purchases, the other organizational adoption of new technology. Organizational Buying Decisions. The decision by organizations to buy specific products is considered distinct from consumer-oriented marketing in four ways: the seller’s interfunctional dependence, product complexity, buyer/seller interdependence and the complexity of the organizational buying process [29: 14-17]. The latter three characteristics are relevant to this study. Significant purchases usually require involvement from multiple individuals within the organizations, representing as many as six different roles: initiator, user, decider, influencer, buyer and gatekeeper [6, 30]. Decisions are reached through a combination of interpersonal (intraorganizational) influence tactics, including problem-solving, persuasion, bargaining and politicking [26]. The organization’s decision is often stimulated by a boundary-spanning employee who acts as an internal advocate for an external vendor [19]. The influence of any particular influencer are related