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Inter-organizational business processes are the basis of a globalized, highly dynamic, and digitalized world, enabling faster and cost-effective transactions. At the same time, they raise business vulnerabilities. A particular vulnerability is linked to the substantiation of trust between actors in dynamic business relationships, as trust affects interdependencies and complexity. An approach to address this vulnerability is the introduction of accountability mechanisms. Extant research suggests that accountability enables revealing causality and a transparent allocation of responsibilities for each process step. Thereby, corresponding actors can judge upon misbehavior and verify trust claims. Unfortunately, a thorough understanding of accountability and its dimensions accountability in the context of IBP is still missing. To address this gap, we develop a framework with dimensions of accountability. We demonstrate the resulting framework in an industrial supply chain case and derive implications for theory and practice.

Government as a Platform (GaaP) is a promising approach to the digital transformation of the public sector. GaaP aims at the development of efficient and user-friendly services by exploiting platform principles such as openness, modularization and cocreation. Hence, GaaP claims to deliver a new level of stakeholder participation in the production of public services. However, the success of GaaP is arguably bound to the context of a country. To address the potential impact of a country's context, the goal of this paper is to identify barriers and measures to overcome them in the application of GaaP in the federal context of Germany. We conduct a literature review and investigate a use case of a German digital government agency by means of documents, expert interviews and workshops. The agency applies GaaP to its architecture management of the federal IT infrastructure. We find five barriers and three measures to overcome. We conclude by discussing implications for theory and practice.