Tools for Collaboration: Using and Designing Tools in Interorganizational Economic-Crime Investigation

Economic-crime investigation in Finland is in transition from hierarchically organized, sequential collaboration between authorities toward parallel, interorganizational collaboration. This article describes the tools used and developed for managing the new collaborative economic-crime-investigation process. The challenge is to find interoganizational investigative tools that are flexible enough to shift between vertical use within and horizontal use across organizations. Local construction is often needed in collaborative networks, otherwise the tool never meets the needs of the divergent users. A good tool is sensitive enough to adapt to local settings, and robust enough to be transferable to other contexts. In this article, I give empirical examples of how the challenge is met in the economic-crime investigation cases followed from 1999 to 2002. The findings suggest that the standardization of tools does not take place merely from the top-down, and that something new is emerging: collaborative standardization of local innovations.