When standards is not enough to secure interoperability and competitiveness for European exporters

This paper addresses Information Systems (IS) standards from a managerial perspective. Standards can be seen as behavior regulations where there is a lack of hierarchical and market steering mechanisms. The use of government standards to harmonize IS is complicated, since in comparison to hardware and software products, IS are specific to the context in which they are implemented. Only hardware and software can be pre-fabricated. Based on a comparative case study of implementations of regulation from the European Commission seeking to harmonize European e-Customs, this paper develops a taxonomy of deviation sources for IS standards implementation divergence – reasons why implementations of IS standards differ. In addition to the previously known deviation sources: a) work process, b) data meaning, and c) data model, we found two new potential deviation sources in mode of transfer, and timing of implementation. Furthermore, all these sources seems to be of the nature that even the slightest deviation in any of the areas leads to the standard failing to meet its objective of increased efficiency with detrimental effects to the competitiveness of European exporters.

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