In Cloud we Trust? Dealing with Uncertainties in Platform Services

• In Event: 579 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 08. Algorithmic Culture

Abstract

Platform services — services that are provided to organizations through online platforms — are increasingly being adopted and used within firms. The novelty of these services is generating significant uncertainties for both provider and customer organizations, but how these uncertainties are managed by the platform provider and what consequences they produce are not well understood. I conducted an 18-month field study of a platform service in the enterprise cloud computing industry to examine these questions. I found uncertainties associated with a number of concerns about the platform (privacy, security, flexibility, capacity, responsiveness, innovativeness) and the platform provider (trustworthiness, credibility), and identified five mechanisms that the platform provider employs to manage these concerns — architecting boundaries, enforcing safeguards, segmenting customers, producing trust rhetoric, and articulating trust indicators. The first three mechanisms constitute platform work, — the work of designing, safeguarding, and keeping the system up and running so as to ensure the reliability of the platform, while the latter two mechanisms constitute trust work — the work of producing and disseminating a trust rhetoric so as to assure customers and prospects of the accountability of the platform provider. I found that both platform and trust work entail practices that normalize the uncertainties by downplaying certain concerns (e.g., privacy, responsiveness), while emphasizing others (e.g., security, trustworthiness). Findings highlight the enactment of uncertainty management, showing how reliability (of the platform) and accountability (of the platform provider) are performed in an ongoing manner, with important implications for distributed inter-organizational relationships in the digital economy.

Author

• Arvind Karunakaran, Massachusetts Institute of Technology