Collaborative implementation of inter-organizational interoperability in a complex setting

This paper explores the challenges in the collaborative implementation of interorganizational interoperability through observations of social dynamics. We focus on an inter-organizational information system that has interfaces with several information systems managed by different organizations. This complexity increases degrees of difficulty of the implementation projects. Our main finding is that as the inter-organizational nature of the problem increases considerably the technical complexity of the implementation, it also significantly increases difficulties in the social dynamics. We argue that a careftd analysis of these social issues can reveal some interesting viewpoints that otherwise may stay hidden. We limit this paper to consider only the implementation of an inter-organizational information system that is implemented to support pre-defiried joint fianctionalities.