A method to measure software adoption in organizations: a preliminary study

The decision about the adoption of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) is a key issue in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Indeed, very often such organizations don’t have the resources needed to fully evaluate the migration from existing legacy systems. To help the decision process of these organizations, we propose a preliminary study about an instrument based on the analysis of files’ generation of targeted data standards. We model the file generation process as a selfreinforcing mechanism through the usage of urn models. By applying the instrument to a large dataset in the office automation field, we found a first confirmation about the importance of network externalities as reported by theory and the importance of past historical file generation for the subsequent file generation process.