Interpreting Certification as a Signal of Interoperability: Organisational Implications in a Qualitative Case Study

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how reliance on ONVIF certification, a global interoperability standard in the network video industry, influences how a large technology company organises its internal organisational structures, roles, responsibilities and resource allocation. Technical standards such as ONVIF, with adherence validated through certification processes, are widely used to promote interoperability between products from different manufacturers. However, relative to technical and financial aspects which have been heavily researched, the organisational role that certification has, with how it is interpreted and relied upon within firms, still remains underexplored. The aim is to approach the identified research gap on how certification works as an organisational mechanism by looking beyond its technical and commercial roles to how this organisational phenomenon affects how companies coordinate, prioritise and make sense of standardisation in practice. The study is structured as a qualitative, interpretivist single-case study, combining abductive reasoning with thematic analysis of empirical data. To gain multiple perspectives, eighteen semi-structured interviews were held with five different organisational roles, both within the case company: managerial roles, implementation engineers, quality assurance leads, customer-facing roles, as well as externally: both the current and previous chairmen of the ONVIF organisation itself. This sampling approach of considering multiple roles was implemented to gather differing perspectives of how certification is interpreted and how it influences how work is organised across different functional and organisational positions within the case company. The findings show that ONVIF certification has multiple roles within the case company: as a pre-requisite for market access, an organisational coordination mechanism, a shared starting point that allows for multiple diverging role-based interpretations, and a strategic business enabler. Certification is considered to be a minimum requirement for market participation, in contrast to the development of proprietary functionality, which is seen as the main method of competitive differentiation. Empirical data suggests that certification is not in practice always able to guarantee seamless interoperability, even for two equally-certified products, as the intentionally limited scope of what is required for conformance creates some variance between what formal testing verifies and what the market assumes the certificate implies. Emergent from the empirical and theoretical analysis, the findings are concentrated into an analytical framework which highlights how the case company addresses the adoption and maintenance of the ONVIF standard, thereby producing contributions to institutional theory and to organisational literature on technical standards by demonstrating that certification functions as a multi-layered organisational mechanism, with implications for how standardising organisations construct their certification frameworks and how companies structure their engagement with external standards.