Configurational Analysis of Infrastructuring in Digital Identity Platforms

Introduction

Provision of digital identity to residents of a country has got much attention in current public governance discourse (Mir et al., 2020). United Nations 16th Sustainable Development Goals SDG¹ recommended that every country provide its citizens a legal identity for provision of public services by the year 2030 as per United Nation charter for SDG 2016. However, very few countries have fully implemented comprehensive digital identity systems.²

In several cases, digital identity has been provided based on digital platforms. Such systems are termed digital identity platforms. Digital platforms have extendible software codebases as the platform core on which eco system partners develop complementary value-added applications for platform users (Tiwana, 2018). In commercial business domains, leading digital platforms are known to expand into adjoining business domains pursuing a revenue maximization strategy (Constantinides, Henfridsson and Parker, 2018) (e.g., Facebook and Google expanding to fields of advertisement, digital publishing, marketing, analytics, entertainment, etc.). Due to such horizontal expansion in adjoining domains, these digital platforms have transformed as digital infrastructures of modern society (De Reuver, Sorenson and Basole, 2018). Infrastructures are defined as the “substructure or underlying foundation; the basic installations, which are critical for continuance and growth of a community or corporate e.g., roads, rail, power plants, transportation etc.” (Star and Ruhleder,1996). Digital infrastructures, similarly, are computing and network resources that allow multiple stakeholders to orchestrate their services and content and are critical for society or corporations to survive and function (e.g., digital infrastructures in different sectors like health, education, urban transportation, energy supply, government, and digital payments, etc.) (Henfridsson and Bygstad, 2013).

Digital identity is important for society as it augments effectiveness of public governance. Effectiveness of public governance is its ability to ensure that welfare measures undertaken by government reaches intended beneficiaries, and digital identity can facilitate this aim (Melin et al., 2016). Increased effectiveness of public governance is possible using digital identity since it ensures targeted delivery, less leakage, and reduced overhead cost (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2019). Due to such efficiencies, digital identity systems are also used in related domains of direct government welfare transfer, banking, finance, healthcare, education, rural wages disbursal, etc. for better delivery and service provisioning to public. Similar to infrastructural behavior in business oriented digital platforms, such expansion imparts infrastructure nature to digital identity platforms as well. In this research, such phenomena have been termed as infrastructuring of digital identity platforms.