Dealing with uncertainties in platform services

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 uncertainties for both providers and customers. As these uncertainties and their consequences are not well understood in the existing literature, our research focused on articulating the nature of these uncertainties and explicating how they are being managed by providers of platform services. We conducted an 18-month field study of a platform service in the enterprise cloud computing industry, and found uncertainties associated with a number of concerns over the platform's privacy, security, flexibility, capacity, responsiveness, and innovativeness, and about the trustworthiness and credibility of the platform provider. We 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 can be seen to 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. We found that both platform and trust work entail practices of materialization that normalize the uncertainties by downplaying certain concerns (privacy, capacity, responsiveness, credibility), while emphasizing others (security, flexibility, innovativeness, trustworthiness). Our 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 the delivery of platform services to firms.