Standards-Based Delivery of Multi-Contextual Services: On the Identity Tension

Journal article, 2013

There has been little theorizing so far about the creation of new standards-based information services in public organizations. In this paper, we explore through a longitudinal case study at the Swedish Road Administration (SRA) how two standards - Alert-C and Location Code - were adapted as to deliver a traffic information service called RDS-TMC. Our in situ analysis reveals that the inherited norms, roles, and rules of the public organization hampered service delivery, which eventually created a tension between the old identity and the new identity of SRA - a tension we refer to as identity tension. Undergoing identity change, SRA had to deliberately configure infrastructural capabilities to better align its operational logics to the new service requirements. The findings suggest that digital multi-contextual services pose intriguing challenges for organizational identity among participating organizations.