Mobile Platforms as Convergent Systems – Analysing Control Points and Tussles with Emergent Socio-Technical Discourses

Abstract

In the field of information systems, mobile platforms as convergent systems represent a new direction for research. To date, platforms have been defined in terms of their composition as physical infrastructure (Gawer, 2009). However, the emergence of new digital and convergent services (e.g. VoIP, IPTV, etc.) as well as overlapping physical mobile telecommunications infrastructures provides the foundations for complex mobile platforms (Herzhoff, 2009e and 2011). Consequently, mobile platforms appear to be more complex than earlier work might indicate. For the purposes of this chapter, and as an initial step to understand what a mobile platform is, the authors draw on the idea of mobile platforms as defined by Tiwana et al. (2010). They provide a richer definition that includes the complexity of all the contributors to a mobile platform. Together, they form a digital ecosystem (Tiwana et al. 2010) where multiple actors act and interact. A digital ecosystem includes a platform that serves as a core on which others can build modules that are designed to extend the service possibilities of the platform. It also includes various social actors who build the platform and various modules and a regulatory regime including standards that bind these heterogeneous actors together. In this context, control is a major factor in trying to understand the interactions between the many actors concerned within the ecosystem (Tiwana et al. 2010). However mobile platforms need to be understood as more than just convergent technical systems, which mix multiple layers of physical and digital infrastructures for the creation and distribution of products and services. Mobile platforms also need to be understood in terms of the socio-technical discourses that play out through control points and tussles between the actors in the platform ecosystem. Case studies of service convergence (e.g. VoIP, network sharing, mobile application markers, etc.) on platforms provide examples of tussles and control points, around which tussles unfold. Solving these tussles requires a reframing of controls points as sociotechnical objects which are driven by the need to share resources and content over networks. In other words, control points as socio-material objects (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008) integrated into a socio-technical system (Herzhoff et al, 2009c). We believe that the technical evolution of mobile platforms will benefit from both a socio-technical and a technical