fig congress 2018 - Individual’s motivation in standardization of geographic information
Jonas Lundsten, Jesper Paasch
Geographic information and standardization has gained increased interest in the last decades due to the increased use and exchange of digital data describing geographic and administrative features. Standards and related documents, such as technical reports, play an important part in this for private and public organizations. However, the role and motivation of the individual participants in the standardization process has been less researched. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study on participants’ personal meaningful goals for participating in formal standardization work at the Swedish Standards Institute, SIS. The study focus on production of national standards and related documents, for example national guidelines and other publications. The research question is how project team members are motivated in the standardization project. One or more participants in each of the technical committees, TCs, working with geographic information standardization, have been interviewed in regard to how they perceive their individual involvement in the standardization work and the personal meaningful goals making them to do so. A phenomenological method, Meaning Constitution Analysis (MCA), was used for analyzing the interviewee’s experiences of the projects. The organizational motive behind the project and the personal meaningful goals for the individuals were focused on in the analysis of each interview. The study concluded that the investigated private companies and public organizations’ fulfil their obligations concerning financing the TCs work, but that some companies and organizations do not allow sufficient time for their employees to engage in standardization work, due to prioritization of other day-to-day tasks to be done. That is, standardization was not the organization's main motive. This may lead, apart from poor work environment for the individual participants and concerns about how to prioritize their daily work, which may result in delayed standardization projects. The interviewed participants were mainly motivated by their individual curiosity for the subject. That is, learning was a main personal meaningful goal. However, participants with frequent contacts with stakeholders had a significant motivation for participating, with the long-term goal to satisfy the stakeholders’ needs.
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