The Significance and Barriers to Organizational Interoperability in Smart Service Ecosystems: A Socio-technical Systems Approach

Smart service ecosystems (SSEs) struggle a lot with interoperability. Interoperability consists of many types but two are of interest in this paper: - (1) syntactic and semantic interoperability, and (2) organizational interoperability. While both have received a fair amount of attention in the literature, there’s little discussion on the alignment between (1) and (2), which we argue, is a key enabler of dynamic service integration in SSEs. This paper explores the significance of (mis)alignment between (1) and (2), and the barriers to organizational interoperability in smart service ecosystems. The empirical data for the paper comes from an ongoing innovation project in Norway that aims to develop a smart, secure, and cost-effective home access solution for senior care homes in the municipality of Lillehammer. The empirical findings emphasize the significance of organizational contexts, and demonstrate in part, the theoretical limitations of the socio-technical systems approach when applied to the SSE perspective.