Standard Selection Modes in Dynamic, Complex Industries: Creating Hybrids between Market Selection and Negotiated Selection of Standards

Several sectors within Information and Communication Technology demonstrate a shift from purely market-based selection of standards or purely negotiated selection of standards to hybrid selection processes, where both market competition and negotiation play a role. Negotiated standard setting processes (such as those organised by the ITU) assure interoperability of technical components and services. Private firms, however, increasingly tend to undercut these collective actions. Their innovations jump-start new developments, but also create incompatibilities, lock-in effects, and pockets of market power. Internet telephony is an example, where firms, standard setting alliances, and political institutions create a hybrid market-based / negotiated standard setting environment. The paper explores the development of this hybrid networking environment. It posits propositions which are illustrated by means of case studies of the DVD and Internet telephony.industrial organization ;

Geospatial information infrastructures

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,sharing,and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments

Internet Governance: the State of Play

The Global Forum on Internet Governance held by the UNICT Task Force in New York on 25-26 March concluded that Internet governance issues were many and complex. The Secretary-General's Working Group on Internet Governance will have to map out and navigate this complex terrain as it makes recommendations to the World Summit on an Information Society in 2005. To assist in this process, the Forum recommended, in the words of the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations at the closing session, that a matrix be developed "of all issues of Internet governance addressed by multilateral institutions, including gaps and concerns, to assist the Secretary-General in moving forward the agenda on these issues." This paper takes up the Deputy Secretary-General's challenge. It is an analysis of the state of play in Internet governance in different forums, with a view to showing: (1) what issues are being addressed (2) by whom, (3) what are the types of consideration that these issues receive and (4) what issues are not adequately addressed

Information Technology as Coordination Infrastructure

Business information technology is traditionally viewed as information provision technology. In this view, organizations use their IT to implement databases that provide people with information when they want it. This view is persistent even though information provision is never an end in itself but always has the further purpose to support the coordination of activities of people. The role if IT as coordination technology became more prominent in the 1980s with the advent of network technology, that allowed activities across different businesses to be coordinated. This trend has accellerated since the growth of Internet usage, and today IT is used to support an increasingly varied range of processes performed by a variety of partners that do not all have a hierarchical relation to each other. This makes it difficult to analyze requirements for IT support and specify IT solutions: Business processes may not be well-defined, and interests of different businesses may clash. This report argues that to deal with this in requirements engineering and IT solution specification, business information technology should not be viewed as IT support for business processes but as IT support for the coordination of activities in one or more businesses. We will identify three basic coordination mechanisms, namely coordination by price, by management, and by shared norms, and for each of these mechanisms, we will identify requirements for IT support. The advent of flexible and standardized networking technology has facilitated the creation of novel coordination mechanisms within these three general paradigms, and we will give an inventory of generalized coordination mechanisms made possible by current IT. Finally, we will draw conclusions for requirements engineering methods for IT support for each of the coordination mechanisms identified by the framework

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed