Summary and Recommendations

The benefits of standardization are realised through the effective adoption, implementation and use of standards. Nonetheless, there are a cross-section of factors that impact the adoption and diffusion of standards. Indeed, within the IT standards research community, there is a research area devoted to looking at IT standards adoption. However, there are currently a limited number of peer-reviewed, empirical studies that look at the adoption of IT standards. One particular set of IT standards where this is true is ISO data-exchange standards, particularly those produced by the ISO subcommittee ISO/TC184/SC4, and to date there are only two known studies that have looked at the adoption of the 614 standards published by the SC4 subcommittee.