Who Pays For TT?

The group discussions would repeatedly come back to the point of ``Who pays for it?'' Funding is a central issue in TT. First, because TT does not come for free. Second, because funding patterns drive how the organizations participating in the process operate and how the process is managed.

There are a number of funding schemes that are appropriate in different organizational settings:

• If TT is structured using a marketing strategy then it is traditional that marketing (thus TT) gets paid by the customer. If customers have been persuaded that sufficient value is delivered, they will pay for it. A number of joint-venture schemes are possible to facilitate mixed funding between sources and recipients of technologies.

• When government organizations are involved, the TT process is not regarded as a money-making operation. The goal is to recover only the operational costs. Government organizations act as third-party funding sources to ``prime the pump.'' The issues are: how to determine time-to-recover of costs and how to recover the costs. Schemes that are applied or may be applied shortly involve: subscriber fees for users of code libraries, fee-for-service-rendered contracts, transfer TT project to external ``technology brokers'' who are profit-and-loss groups.

• Some organizations become TT agents by transferring a technology as value added to their own products or services. An example, is the access and use of the Internet made available to students by universities as value added to their own educational services.

• In industry, internal R&E laboratories usually have TT responsibilities. The funding of such organizations has a substantial influence on what, when, and how technology is transferred. A number of different ``tax schemes'' are used to fund such groups. Central funding at the corporate level encourage longer-term technology development rather than technology transfer. Funding from distributed sources close to the profit-and-loss centers makes their managers more aware of R&E expenditure and more demanding about ROI. These schemes tend to encourage TT over technology development and shorter-term projects. Funding groups have a strong influence about what gets transferred, to whom, and how the process takes place. Mixed schemes enable trade-offs between investing in technology development and TT.

• In the US a number of Consortia with industry or mixed industry-government membership (e.g., MCC, SPC, SEI) have been in operation for many years. The results have been mixed. These groups appear to have succeeded in TT (in Reuse as well as other software engineering domains) only in those cases where they operated very closely to the users.

• In Europe, the EEC has funded for more than a decade a number of government and government-industry funded cooperation projects (e.g., ESPRIT, ESSI, EUREKA). By and large these programs have succeeded in creating networks of collaborators and multiple channels for technology transfer between partners. Several projects have focused on Reuse (e.g., Knosos, Reboot, MACS). The ROI, however, is not easy to determine.

The old saw, ``when there is a will there is a way,'' also applies to Reuse TT. Many successful TT projects take place without official funding, with participants working out of their own initiative, on their time, in skunk-works mode. Such projects are usually carried out through the collaboration of networks of individuals sharing common professional interests. The Internet has a very positive effect in supporting the social processes key to the development and operation of such groups.