Standardization as a knowledge game

In the tradition of grounded research, this paper presents the concept of standardization as a knowledge game based on in-depth interviews with twelve practitioners. It focuses on standardization within organizations in the context of ensuring high availability of information systems. In this context the objective of the game, and hence standardization, is to ensure that the feedforward and feedback processes required to build the knowledge base of an organization will maximize the preemptive time for proactive problem prevention and minimize the recovery time from reactive problem solving.