An implementer in the hand is worth two in the bush?

Mar 21, 2012

Let’s say.. hypothetically…

that your community had spent years building a standard. It’s really comprehensive, but the cost of adoption is proven a lot higher than anticipated. In fact, than is justified**. But in spite of that, a bunch of early adopters have bought into the standard, and gone off an implemented it. But a much larger bunch of potential implementers won’t use it because of the adoption cost. A subgroup of those are stakeholders who are now quite disaffected**.

Then there is a proposed change.The change will reduce adoption cost, and potentially increase the size of the adopters group, and increase the size of the potential implementers (yes, increase, because success begets success). But from the point of view of the adopters:

  • This is bad, because as early adopers, they’ve already paid the cost of adoption, and now there’ll be a new cost
  • This is good, because the adopters group will increase, and they’ll derive more benefit
  • This is bad, because more adopters will mean they have less influence over the standard

From the point of view of the disaffected stakeholders, it’s all good.

So whether the change gets approved depends:

  • If the early adopters are smaller than the disaffected parties, it’ll probably get up
  • But the reverse is more likely (because disaffected stakeholders rapidly become non-stakeholders), and then it will depend on whether the benefit of a bigger adopter group outweighs the cost for the early adopters

If the early adopters represent a small set of relatively contained trading partners, so that the benefits of wider adoption are somewhat abstract, then the early adopters will be fiercely opposed to change. Does this ring a bell with anyone?

Anyway, putting aside the early adopters interest, what’s in the interest of the organization? Well, the fact is that the early adopters are committed - this time. Whatever the changes are, paying the price is less than going somewhere else (this is a variation on the theme of all-pay auctions). The early adopters are over the barrel, and the organization has nothing to lose by forcing them to pay again for change. And clearly, getting a bigger implementation group is in the interest of the organization.

First conclusion: It’s a bad thing for a standards organization if the early adopters represent one or a few relatively coherent trading blocks

Actually, of course, from an organisation’s point of view, this is the same dilemma faced by any company - should we value our existing customers, who’ve already paid us, or possible new customers, who still might actually pay us. From a short term view, the latter, of course, but the more you do that, the more your potential future customers will not trust you. Howe much trust do you have, and what’s it worth?

Beyond that, what’s best for the community? Can the specification be changed to reduce the cost of adoption to clearly less than the justified cost? What are the other alternatives? When does the community itself need to abandon past investments in favor of future ones?

It’d be nice if this kind of decision could be made easily, cleanly, on mathematical of logical grounds (and, in fact, my first draft of this blog post included mathematical formulas). But no, unfortunately, the one factor you can never afford to ignore is the Fog Of War: frankly, no one has any idea what’s going on.