13th European Conference on eGovernment – ECEG 2013 1 | 页面 268

Stefan Henningsson, Jonas Hedman and Bo Andersson Table 1: Architecture control points in the payment infrastructure

5. Discussion and conclusion

Increasingly, e‐Government innovation moves beyond the scope of digitizing governmental services to challenges of governing and facilitating innovation of public‐private IT infrastructures that are essential in today ' s society. Not at least because of the turbulence in the financial industry and the emergence of mobile payments, the shaping of the payment infrastructure is a topical subject in the e‐Government discourse.

The history of payments portrays an evolutionary process where the claiming of architectural control points has played a significant role in the shaping of the payments. Recently, payments have become increasingly digitalized. As a consequence, strategies of claiming control points have taken the form of digital means. Internationally, the SWIFT network has been established as one control point. In Europe, the TARGET2 system forms one control point. In Denmark, the Kronos system constitutes a national control point.

Taken together, the control points means that actors can exercise some control of the otherwise‘ drifting’ evolution of the digital payment infrastructure. For example, the Danish Government is able to control the actor’ s who gets access to the Kronos system, thereby influencing the constituent of the payment ecosystem.

However, the extensive use of control points also come with consequences. Outside the established digital payment infrastructure, rival ecosystems and rival DI’ s are emerging. Internet‐based payments, mediated by actors such as PayPal, Google Wallet, Apple Passbook, and iZettle are surpassing the existing control points to introduce faster and more radical innovation. Similarly, Telecom providers are looking into ways of utilizing the mobile phone networks for digital payments.

So, while the actors of the ecosystem surrounding the digital payment infrastructure are at least partly successful in shaping the evolution of the government controlled digital payment infrastructure, the challenge lies in balancing control and flexibility of innovation. As noted by Hanseth et al.( 2012), architectural control points may hamper infrastructure innovation. If so, the government controlled digital payment infrastructure runs the risk of being‘ out innovated’ by rival infrastructures for digital payments. Different legal and technical control points leads to that the different emerging infrastructures are following different rules of innovation, which favors one infrastructure in front of the other in the innovation game.

Acknowledgements

This work was carried with the support of Copenhagen Finance IT Region( www. cfir. dk) and was funded by the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority grant number ERDFH‐ 09‐0026.

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