Selecting Interorganizational Standards - A Management Cybernetics Perspective

Interorganizational Standards (IOS) are a key-lever to digitizing business relationships within value creating networks. They provide assistance in bridging organizational borders by providing standard processes and semantics. Various IOS have been developed for supporting complex, partly domain dependent communication scenarios. Only little academic work analyzes the process of selecting a specific standard (set) out of several sufficient and therefore “rival” candidates in situations of specifying a technological infrastructure for exchange. We argue that selecting a specific standard is a profound decision problem. This research contributes to this decision problem. First, by reflecting the academic field of Management Cybernetics we illustrate how this theoretical lens helps us to understand the nature of business relationships. Based on our findings we elaborate propositions that inform the standard selection. Second, this work may inspire researchers by the way propositions are utilized in design-oriented IS research by both guiding the actual design process and serving as profound reference in artifact evaluation.