IT Standards Adoption and Diffusion Models

The motivation behind this research is to identify the factors that impact the adoption of data-exchange standards, such as STEP. Research into the adoption of STEP and other standards produced by ISO/TC184/SC4, which is the ISO technical committee responsible for the development of STEP, is very limited. Currently there are only two specific empirical studies (Dreverman, 2005; Meister, 2004) that shed light on the factors associated with the adoption of ISO/TC184/SC4 (referred to as SC4 for the remainder of the chapter) standards like STEP. This means that practitioners devoted to the ongoing development and use of these standards, and academics, still lack a significant body of evidence regarding the factors and barriers critical to their adoption.