Facilitating Adoption of International Information Infrastructures: A Living Labs Approach

Abstract

Abstract.One of the key challenges that governments face in supervising international supply chains is the need for improving the quality of data accompanying the logistics flow. In many supply chains, individual parties in the chain work with low quality data for their operations and compliance, even though somewhere in the supply chain, better data is available. In the European CASSANDRA project, ICT-supported information infrastructures are developed to exchange data between businesses and government, to support visibility on the supply chain and the re-use of information. However, to gain better data, actors need to be open about their operations, processes and systems to parties that are geographically and culturally on the other side of the world. This adds (perceived) vulnerabilities for parties already operating in a highly competitive environment. This could be a major barrier for making the innovation work. We argue that Living Labs, as a collaborative innovation approach, are able to support the adoption of innovative information infrastructures. They help identifying gains that innovations may bring. Furthermore, the trust-based setting also mitigates the added (perceived) vulnerability such innovations bring for the participants. We illustrate this by examples from the CASSANDRA Living Labs.

Design of a software architecture supporting business-to-government information sharing to improve public safety and security

“…The ENS is the main source for the risk assessment done by customs (Zomer 2011). However, the information in documents such as the ENS is often not timely, or has been altered, is inaccurate or is vague (Klievink and Lucassen 2013;Lee and Whang 2000;Hesketh 2010). This poses safety and security risks (Hesketh 2010).…”

“…By trust we mean that parties need to be confident that the parties they share information with will not misuse the information they acquire or are otherwise victims of opportunistic behaviour by others (Hart and Saunders 1997;Klievink and Lucassen 2013). However, when sharing information, parties often have little information on the competence, care in use and reliability of others (Mishra 1996).…”

“…A perceived increase in vulnerabilities due to revealing information, combined with a lack of incentives to share, seriously hampers new information sharing initiatives (Klievink and Lucassen 2013). Therefore, even in cases in which information sharing may improve public safety and security, businesses might be unwilling to share.…”

Interconnecting Governments, Businesses and Citizens – A Comparison of Two Digital Infrastructures

“…The private organizations were mainly involved in the II design to explore the open data field rather than to deliver an II that they aimed to use themselves. In contrast, the second case of 26 partners employed a 'Living Lab' methodology in which existing trade lanes of the project partners were used to implement, test and refine the development of the infrastructure [32]. In this way, for each trade lane, a host of business partners got involved that were not part of the project consortium, but play a key role in providing the data required, and in using the functionality based on it.…”

Design of a Business-to-Government Information Sharing Architecture Using Business Rules

“…There are however some factors, such as the competitive advantage of having information that other parties do not have, that might make businesses unwilling to share their information [2]. Some research has been conducted on building trust between stakeholders and on governance and identifying gains of using architectures facilitating information sharing, in order to support the adoption of such architectures [3][4][5]. In this paper, the main premise is that in order for businesses to be willing to share information, businesses and government agencies first will want to make sure that the sharing and use of information does not harm their interests and that it complies with legislation [2,6].…”