Collaborative Research: Interorganizational Information System Integration Through Industry-wide Standardization: Technical Design Choices and Collective Action Dilemmas

行业协调各个组织的行动的一种方式是通过关于过程和规范标准的正式协议。人们对推动这种对我们国家经济竞争力至关重要的关键协调的机制知之甚少。新的信息架构技术（例如，XML）正在迅速取代几十年前的稳定格式（例如，EDI），以不可预见的方式改变标准流程。本建议实证研究的发展，采用，实施和传播的行业范围内的垂直信息系统标准在三个不同的行业：汽车，零售和抵押贷款融资。由于标准的传播是独立的组织一级行动和集体的行业一级行动之间的复杂的相互作用，三个案例研究的基础上收集的数据，从每个行业的60家公司的样本，这使得一个标准的采用和使用的相对成功的比较，以及其后果。这是一种独特的多层次方法，研究集体行动动态对特定IT设计功能的影响。更广泛的影响：改进组织间电子协作具有巨大潜力，可降低交易成本，发展更具竞争力的产业。这些好处可以降低消费者的价格。此外，更多地使用开放的互联网标准为那些不能充分享受早期电子数据交换办法好处的较小组织提供了新的机会。该研究还将为从业者的教育提供材料，并将推进几个领域的知识状态，包括信息系统和技术，管理，工业工程，经济学，社会学和社会信息学。

One way industries harmonize the actions of individual organizations is via formal agreements on process and specification standards. Little is known about the mechanisms that drive this critical coordination so foundational to our national economic competitiveness. New information architecture technologies (e.g., XML) are rapidly replacing decades-old, stable formats (e.g., EDI), transforming the standards process in unforeseen ways. This proposal empirically examines the development, adoption, implementation, and diffusion of industry-wide vertical information systems standards in three diverse industries: automotive, retailing, and mortgage finance. As standards diffusion is a complex interaction between independent organization-level action and collective industry-level action, the three case studies are grounded by data collection with a sample of 60 companies from each industry, which enables comparisons of relative success of a standard's adoption and use as well as its consequences. This is a unique multi-level approach, investigating the impact of collective action dynamics on specific IT design features. Broader impacts: Improved electronic interorganizational collaboration has enormous potential to reduce transaction costs and develop more competitive industries. Such benefits can lead to lower prices for consumers. Moreover, the greater use of open Internet standards promises new opportunities for smaller organizations that were not able to enjoy the full benefits of earlier EDI approaches. The research will also produce materials for the education of practitioners and will advance the state of knowledge in several fields, including information systems and technology, management, industrial engineering, economics, sociology, and social informatics.