Adopter-Centric Perspective

The focus of this research is to identify the factors and barriers critical to the adoption of data-exchange standards. Chapter Five identified these factors from an innovationcentric viewpoint, and the purpose of this chapter is to establish the factors that are relevant from an adopter-centric approach. This approach focuses on the adoption of an innovation, in this case standards, within an organization. The chosen organization for this research is the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD). However, in order to limit some of bias of adopter-centric studies identified by West (1999), this chapter not only focuses on the adoption of an ISO data-exchange standard within the MoD, but also looks at the adoption of a regional and UK national defence standard. It is hoped that by comparing the adoptionof an ISO standard with a regional standard and national standard, a better distinction can be made between the factors that are unique to the adoption of an ISO data-exchange standard, and those that are common to the adoption of any standard or innovation within the MoD.