PurposeSharing knowledge with business partners is a challenging issue as firms need to share their valuable know-how assets with individuals or other companies out of their organizational boundaries. As supply chain management (SCM) deals with various stakeholders, firms face difficulties with privacy and ownership when they share their know-how with suppliers or business partners. This study introduces blockchain technology as a mediator in improving knowledge sharing (KS) practices in supply chains.Design/methodology/approachThe data have been collected from surveys with 116 experts working in blockchain start-ups and organizations, and the authors used structural equation modeling for its analysis.FindingsThe results show that two features of blockchain technology, namely transparency and security, have the highest impacts on mediating knowledge sharing impacts on supply chain performance. The authors’ findings also highlight that among the performance metrics of SCM, speed is highly improved when blockchain technology is used for knowledge sharing. Their study provides guidance for managers on how to improve SCM performance through KS, which is empowered by a blockchain system.Originality/valueThe authors’ findings help organizations to improve supply chain actions, improve innovation, enhance competitive advantage and increase the speed of relationships in the supply chain. The research also contributes literature by analyzing the key factors showing how knowledge sharing structure may be improved by blockchain technology which would be helpful for both academics and practitioners.

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Sensemaking is a popular and useful organizational behaviour concept that is gaining visibility in the field of information systems. However, it remains relatively unknown compared to more established information systems concepts like technology acceptance and resistance. To enhance and propel greater use of sensemaking in information systems, this article offers a systematic explanation of sensemaking, specifically focusing on its concept, process, strengths, and shortcomings, as well as discussing ways forward for information systems in contemporary business environments.

With the advent of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), services can be registered, invoked, and combined by their identical Quality of Services (QoS) attributes to create a new value-added application that fulfils user requirements. Efficient QoS-aware service composition has been a challenging task in cloud computing. This challenge becomes more formidable in emerging resource-constrained computing paradigms such as the Internet of Things and Fog. Service composition has regarded as a multi-objective combinatorial optimization problem that falls in the category of NP-hard. Historically, the proliferation of services added to problem complexity and navigated solutions from exact (none-heuristics) approaches to near-optimal heuristics and metaheuristics. Although metaheuristics have fulfilled some expectations, the quest for finding a high-quality, near-optimal solution has led researchers to devise hybrid methods. As a result, research on service composition shifts towards the hybridization of metaheuristics. Hybrid metaheuristics have been promising efforts to transcend the boundaries of metaheuristics by leveraging the strength of complementary methods to overcome base algorithm shortcomings. Despite the significance and frontier position of hybrid metaheuristics, to the best of our knowledge, there is no systematic research and survey in this field with a particular focus on strategies to hybridize traditional metaheuristics. This study's core contribution is to infer a framework for hybridization strategies by conducting a mapping study that analyses 71 papers between 2008 and 2020. Moreover, it provides a panoramic view of hybrid methods and their experiment setting in respect to the problem domain as the main outcome of this mapping study. Finally, research trends, directions and challenges are discussed to benefit future endeavours.