The Anatomy of Digital Trade Infrastructures

Abstract

In global supply chains information about transactions resides in fragmented pockets within business and government systems. The lack of reliable, accurate and complete information makes it hard to detect risks (such as safety, security, compliance, commercial)

Digital Trade Infrastructures: A Framework for Analysis

“…This article contributes knowledge about digital infrastructures that was obtained through our participation in the CORE EU-funded project; it is based on the working paper [1], a short version of which was presented at the BIR 2017 conference [2]. In global supply chains, information about transactions resides in fragmented business and government systems.…”

“…Some of the reported problems correspond to issues of technological complexity and actor enlistment, which are known challenges within the DI literature. Other issues seem to be specific to the trade domain, with its intricate interplay of governments at national and international level to control the flow of goods and influence decisions related to infrastructural initiatives [2], [15]. This limited amount of cumulative knowledge development concerns the specific challenges of developing infrastructures in the areas of trade or DTIs'.…”

Coordinated Border Management Through Digital Trade Infrastructures and Trans-National Government Cooperation: The FloraHolland Case

“…infrastructures for the healthcare domain that are solely on a national level. The first aspect refers to the international dimension of international trade, where goods transcend national borders and regulatory regimes [20,14]. The importance of the international dimension has been also highlighted in a stream of research focusing on Transnational Information Systems [2] and can be traced to other domains such as banking as well.…”

“…In the international trade domain digital infrastructures, here referred to as Digital Trade Infrastructures (DTI), have been seen as an instrument to help address the trade facilitation and security challenges. It has been argued that DTI can transcends the current information silos and can enable more efficient risk assessment, supply chain optimization and cost savings [1,14,20]. Data pipelines can be seen as an example of DTI, where a data pipeline can be defined as "an IT innovation to enable capturing data at the source" [11, p.14].…”

Comparing the openness of archetypical business-to-government information sharing architectures

“…Information sharing in international container shipping is a domain that currently is an active subject for research (see e.g. [12,21]), and the insights in this paper are thus relevant for this body of work. Furthermore, this work extents the existing work on the design of B2G information sharing architectures (see e.g., [13,17,27,28]).…”