Cultural Factors affecting Interoperability

Oct 4, 2017

One of the under-appreciated factors that affects how successful you’ll be at ‘interoperability’ (for all the various things that it might mean) is your underlying culture of working with other people - your and their underlying expectations about whether and when you’ll compromise with other people in order to pursue a shared goal. Culture varies from organization to organization, and from person to person. And even more, it varies from country to country. As I work with different countries, it’s clear that in some countries, it’s harder to get people to to sacrifice their short term personal interests for shared long term communal interests. There’s plenty of research about this - mostly phrased in terms of micro-economics. And it very often comes to down trust (or lack thereof). Trust is a critical success factor for success at compromise and collaboration. And it’s pretty widely observed that the level of trust that people have in institutions of various kinds is reducing at the moment (e.g. 1 2 3).

Plenty has been written about subject, and I’m not going to add to it. Instead, I’m going to make a couple of related observations that I think are under-appreciated when it comes to interoperability:

The first is that smaller countries with a bigger dominant country that can easily overpower them next door (my go-to examples: Estonia, Denmark, New Zealand) have populations that are much more motivated to collaborate and compromise with each other than countries that are economically (and/or politically) without peer in their geographic area.

And so you might think that these countries are better at interoperability than others…? well, sort of:

Countries that have a cultural disadvantage with regard to interoperability are the countries that produce the great interoperability technologies and methodologies (they have to!), but countries that have a cultural advantage for interoperability are much better at taking those technologies and methodologies and driving them home so the task is complete.

If my theory is right, then when you look at what countries are doing, you should look for different lessons from them, depending upon their cultural situation with regard to interoperability.

p.s. If my theory is right, one really has to wonder how bad are the cultural headwinds against interoperability here in Australia..

p.p.s. I found very little about this on the web. References in comments would be great.