Effective Management of Standardizing in E-Government

Standards play an important role in the interoperable exchange of information among actors with different business functions. Particularly in government, standards enhance communication between public administrations and lay the ground of interoperability in e-government service provision. Still, practice often struggles with numerous challenges such as complex administrative procedures, jurisdiction, numerous stakeholders with diverging wants and needs and the ultimate goal of social welfare. At the same time, academia provides a limited number of approaches to address existing challenges and transferring findings from a private organizations' context is rarely a viable approach. The authors introduce effective management of standardization in e-government by describing the shape of standardization in that specific domain and by encompassing suitable coordination mechanisms. They follow a qualitative explorative research approach and apply coordination theory to pragmatically interpret our findings, offering implications for both theory and practice.