DESIGN, SENSE-MAKING AND NEGOTIATION ACTIVITIES IN THE ‘WEB SERVICES’ STANDARDIZATION PROCESS

Francesco Virili

1/01/2005
(Original Publish Date: 12/14/2003)

This study constitutes a preliminary attempt to refer to Design, Sense-making and Negotiation activities in the investigation of an ongoing standardization process. The D-SN model, recently proposed by Fomin, Keil and Lyytinen, integrates fragments of theory to better understand standardization processes. The three typologies of activity are explained on the basis of designers' cognitive behaviour theory (D=design); sensemaking theory (S=Sense-making) and actor-network theory (N=Negotiation). We are applying the D-S-N model (still under development by the authors) on the 'Web Services' case study, by analysing the emergence of a series of technological standards for distributed software components. The preliminary results of our ongoing analysis of the Web services standardization process seem to confirm the validity of the D-S-N approach, and encourage to proceed extending and deepening the investigation.