The temptation to widen the use of the ISBL through the further standardisation of IS structures and definitions is great. The efficiency benefits that have effectively fuelled IS developments since the 1950s have derived directly from processes of routinisation and standardisation, and further benefits are clearly to be gained by extending these processes to the societal level. It is in any case generally accepted that it is logical to attempt to impose whatever degree of stability is possible on a favourable set of control relationships (Beniger, 1986), which implies that the more tightly the language of business can be controlled, the better. There is thus a strong argument in favor of standardising the language of interaction as far as possible and to maintain strict controls over the definitions in place. It can be assumed that organisations including government departments and agencies already have the power to achieve a lot in this direction.

If there is an organisational downside to this it must be that some loss of flexibility is entailed in adopting a highly standardised approach. Put another way, the more widely that integrated IS structures are adopted, the more a form of interdependence is created in which agreements on change will become hard to reach. While there are no real precedents for this type of situation, it can be noted that past attempts to ‘freeze’ a language in the interests of control have tended to create an element of ritual, in which original intentions and meanings have been wholly or partially lost (Crystal, 1987, p. 405).

Overall, the most definite conclusions that can be drawn in this regard stem from the fact that the strong control of vocabulary equates to a rigid formalism of interaction. If there is a practical risk to the adopting organisations, as distinct from the risks to customers and client organisations identified in previous sections, it is one that is difficult to represent in economic terms. The literature on IT economics suggests, for instance, that it is difficult if not impossible to identify any clear loss of organisational flexibility from within the context of a single investment decision (Ryan, 2000; Willcocks and Lester, 1996; Parker and Benson, 1988) and the broader implications of cumulative losses of flexibility are as yet unresearched. What the language perspective suggests is that there must be some loss of flexibility and that this could be problematic if business strategies concerning customers become more volatile.