County Extension Agents

In the area of innovation diffusion, the United States's agricultural extension service is regarded as the most successful program in the world. As one author said, "It is impossible for anyone to speak ten words about diffusion without two of them being 'agricultural extension'."[25] The service consists of three parts:

  • A Research Subsystem, consisting of research professors at agricultural experiment stations in each of the 50 states. These professors produce the innovations that are later diffused.

  • State Extension Specialists, who link the research work to the County Extension Agents.

  • County Extension Agents, who work with farmers and other people at the local level, helping them to choose innovations appropriate for their needs. They answer practitioners' tough questions such as, "Is the innovation complete, or does it need to be adapted or extended before it can be applied?" and "Are the innovation's successes a result of the innovation itself, or might they be the result of the people using it?"

The agricultural program places a strong emphasis on cooperation among its three parts. Research professors are rewarded for publishing research results in a form directly useful to farmers. State Extension Specialists are evaluated based on how well they relate their technical knowledge to farmers' problems.

The program's annual investment in diffusing agricultural innovation is approximately equal to the annual investment in agricultural research, which makes the program unique. No other Federal program spends more than a few percent of its budget on diffusion, and no other program is as successful at changing common practice.

Experience in the software industry provides some confirmation of the value of emphasizing diffusion. One of the best software organizations, NASA's Software Engineering Laboratory, has found that packaging the results of its measurement and analysis program into guidebooks and training courses is a critical part of its award-winning process-improvement program.[26]

Diffusion of innovation in software is needed, and the software industry does have the beginnings of a diffusion program. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) was created with Federal funding to "provide leadership in advancing the state of the practice of software engineering to improve the quality of systems that depend on software."[27] The SEI essentially performs the role that the Research Subsystem does in the agricultural diffusion model. At about 300 employees to serve 2.9 million software workers, however, the SEI program is only in the beginning stages compared to the agriculture program, which employs about 17,000 people to serve 3.8 million agricultural workers.[28]

Everett Rogers points out that many government agencies have tried to copy the agricultural extension model but have failed because, among other reasons, they didn't establish local-level change agents analogous to the County Extension Agents. Rogers's analysis goes a long way toward explaining the limited impact that the SEI has had so far on commercial practice. The SEI was created by the United States Department of Defense (DoD), and the documents and materials it has produced have had a strong DoD flavor. Not surprisingly, the industries that benefited earliest from the SEI's technology-transfer role were military contractors and government agencies.[29]

The software industry has many subindustries that have specific needs and specialized vocabularies. These subindustries include business systems, Web development, software products, games, medical devices, systems software, computer manufacturing, embedded systems, aerospace, and many others. Combine the failure to translate software engineering innovations into terms familiar to each specific industry with the common lack of in-depth education in software engineering, and you have a formula for slow progress.

Practitioners won't adopt innovations until they get their tough questions answered in terms they can relate to. For software technology transfer to work effectively, either the government or private industry needs to fund roles similar to the State Extension Specialist and County Extension Agent. Software-project needs don't vary from county to county as farming needs do. But they do vary from subindustry to subindustry, and software engineering might very well benefit from extension specialists who can link general software research to specific subindustries.

Other developments that will help speed technology transfer include the elements of a mature profession I have discussed throughout this book: undergraduate educational programs in software engineering, professional credentialing, requirements for ongoing professional education, organizational certification, and a professional code of conduct.



Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
Professional Software Development(c) Shorter Schedules, Higher Quality Products, More Successful Projects, [... ]reers
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 164

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