Somewhat surprisingly, none of the managers and few of the technical staff even knew such tools were available. This can be generalized to the hypothesis that failure to perform basic research on software problem areas slows technology transfer. A military group was exploring civilian best practices for software. Table 1 gives some rough guidelines on how long it might take to evaluate and acquire a new technology, then deploy it throughout an organization so that a majority of management and technical personnel are comfortable and familiar with the new approach. As a general rule, technology evaluation and technology transfer are not very rapid processes, and the bigger the organization, the longer it takes.
Technology transfer is a complex phenomena with many factors involved.