Structural, Normative, and Informational Influence on IT Standards Creation: A Focus on Online Knowledge Communities

As the Internet emerges as a new venue for many business activities, a new organizational form called virtual communities has emerged and rapidly spread out across the entire sector of industry to take advantage of the efficiency of communications technologies. In the knowledge era, such online communities are increasingly being regarded as a cyberspace in which individuals and organizations can meet and exchange the information of their interest that are dispersed both geographically and in time. In IT industry, online communities such as Web-based industry consortia, which heavily utilize computer mediated communication to exchange knowledge, have been playing instrumental roles in creating IT standards. Yet one barely understands how this form of organization works regarding group decision making. This research attempts to investigate structural, normative, and informational influence on IT standards creation process (as an instance of group decisionmaking) in the context of online knowledge communities. Using publicly open email archives from an industry consortium and the survey data from participants in standards creation process, this paper explores the factors associated with organizational, individual, task, and communication media, and investigates the extent to which they influence stakeholder perceptions and IT standards creation process. Then, using different datasets, this paper attempts to generalize the model based on different types of IT standards such as business process oriented standards and technology oriented standards.