Information technology governance in Internet of Things supply chain networks

Information technology governance in Internet of Things supply chain networks

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Industrial Management & Data Systems, Volume 116, Issue 7.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are critical and valuable resources for the success of global supply chain networks. Internet of Things (IoT) plays a major role in the twenty-first century global supply chain design, operations and performance. Michael Burkett, managing vice president at Gartner, said: “It’s important to put IoT maturity into perspective, because of the fast pace at which it is emerging, so supply chain strategists need to be looking at its potential now. Supply chain leaders must design their processes to operate in this digital business world”. This includes fulfilling the new expectations of customers and the volatile demands that digital marketing will create. A future supply chain will meet those expectations by converging people, business and things in a digital value network, and incorporating fast-emerging capabilities such as IoT and smart machines into this design strategy[1].

The evolution and changes in ICT are inevitable due to emerging organizational performance objectives and the role of ICT. These include changes in connectivity and access from standalone computing to pervasive ubiquitous computing, wired to wireless connectivity, 24×7 information availability in smart devices, interactive and customizable social network web pages, abundance instant information and self-organizing networks. In terms of decision making, access to the required information is very limited earlier because of the existence of complex models and limited resources to find solutions.

However, the recent scenario is exactly opposite with plethora of information and excess resources such as super-computing power with each individuals to deal with complex models. Manpower requirements are also changing from programming to content development and customizing exiting tool with their own creativity. The above changes in connectivity, access, decision making and skilled human power have substantial impact of Information Technology (IT) governance. Success of global IoT supply chain networks depends on how they govern the IT changes and make use of the ICT potential to achieve the latent values in terms of supporting organizational competitiveness.

Recent efforts by Tiwana et al. (2013) pointed out potential blind spots in IT and organizational governance based on three dimensions of IT governance cube which includes Who is governed? What is governed? How is it governed? On who is governed aspect blind spots are individual IT applications and discrete services and miniscule attention to large scale ecosystems of firms. The first dimension, who is governed informs that IT governance in pluralistic organizational arrangements exploit the advantages of vertical integration and outsourcing by keeping some innovation activity in-house and rest to complement the markets. Second dimension, what is governed refers to IT artifacts such as hardware and software and promising research avenue in this dimension is on theory development to understand how firms can accomplish managing massive amounts of real-time data, and evidence-based decision making through cultural change. The third dimension corresponds to mechanism used to govern such as decision rights, formal and informal control mechanisms and use of architecture. Potential research avenues in this dimension are IT architecture as a coordination device, dynamics of control evolution between formal and informal modes, antecedents and consequences of global expertise networks. These three dimensions should be investigated in relation to IoT supply chain networks.

The aim of this special issue is to portray how far future IoT supply chain networks can be successful by accommodating and conquering IT governance challenges. We received contributions related to how to deal with three dimensions of IT governance cube on IoT supply chain networks such as IT applications and discrete services, artifacts and decision structure and control mechanisms.

Our call for papers for the special issue was able to attract studies with respect to the three dimensions. We summarize below the major contributions of each article as per three dimensions.

IT applications and discrete services

We received many papers under this dimension and accepted two interesting studies on IT applications and discrete services where the first one studies the application of IT technologies to agricultural sector and the second study is the application of IT technology to enhance collaborative operational capabilities of logistics service provider. Brief summary of the two studies are as follows.

The first study titled “Information sharing in supply chain of agricultural products based on the Internet of Things” analysed the importance of tracking and tracing of agricultural products using two case studies that employs RFID technology to track quality, safety and security of agricultural products. The study analysed the information gathering, sharing and logistics information tracking of agricultural product using IoT with relevant hardware and software.

The second study titled “4th party logistics service providers (4PLSP) and industrial cluster competitiveness: Collaborative operational capabilities framework” analysed the role of 4PLSP in creating cluster competitiveness. Specifically the authors contribute in terms of developing 4PLSP’s operational capabilities as well as answered how this could enhance cluster competitiveness. The major contribution of this study is to propose a collaborative operational capabilities framework that consists of strategic competitive element bonding 4PLSP and industrial clusters. Authors of this paper also analysed the influence of the proposed framework between 4PLSP and specific industrial clusters within China.

Artifacts and decision structure

We received limited papers in this dimension and did not receive any direct application article that explains both artifacts and decision structure. However, we received one bibliometric study titled “Vision, applications and future challenges of Internet of Things: A bibliometric study of the recent literature” which reviewed the previous studies based on IoT vision, applications and influence of researchers. Interesting findings of this study are that the growth of research in IoT in general is exponential with a major focus on technology perspective. Specifically the authors did not find many studies related to smart cities, hospitals and supply chains. Applications in these domains need extensive research based on real-time application evidences as per the cultural change. The authors also classified previous studies into five clusters. Among the five, the first cluster received more attention than others and the last two needed substantial attention from researchers. The first cluster consist of studies based on theoretical and conceptual ideas, the second cluster is more pragmatic and theory development using several applications, the third cluster is about application of IoT in logistics and supply chain, the fourth cluster is more about designing and planning of IoT whereas the fifth cluster is devoted to studies related to security and privacy of IoT.

Control mechanisms

Again, we received many papers under this dimension and accepted two interesting studies interesting studies related to control mechanism and one is about governing information in a dynamic business networking and the other study is about dealing with soft element trust and distrust when engaging multi-agents in a heterogeneous environments. The summary of two studies are given below.

The first study titled “Information Governance Requirements in Dynamic Business Networking” explained an evolutionary challenge to govern the dynamic business networking which involves information intensive and dynamic inter-organizational business processes. Specifically the authors tried to understand the information governance requirements in a dynamic inter-organizational business processes within a business network that enables quality information exchange. The authors focused on supplier-suppler or business to business interactions. In addition authors also reported few consequences of dynamic networked business processes using a case study approach. The study emphasis the need of quality and secure information exchange in dynamic business network.

The second study titled “A reputation-oriented trust model for multi-agent environments” interestingly analyses the soft element such as trust and distrust of risk mitigation in e-commerce environment which uses multi-agent systems. The major contribution of this study is to propose a trust model that includes reputation, dis-repute and conflict. The authors simulated and validated their proposed model is capable to deal with both positive and negative behaviours of service providers and users in a heterogeneous multi agent environment that considers autonomous and self-interested agents.

Overall our special issue received numerous submissions and we are able to accept quality articles that are related to three dimensions of IT governance cube. Among the three dimensions we could easily spot that still artifacts and decision structure dimension is under researched and wide open for researcher to take it on further. We believe that scholars will substantially contribute to this dimension considering the pace of growth of social media and IoT developments that specific attention toward managing human elements interface with technology.

We sincerely thank Professor Hing Kai Chan and Associate Professor Alain Chong, Editor-in-Chiefs of IMDS for offering us an opportunity to unfold newer research avenues in the information governance of IoT networks. In addition this special issue is not possible without the quality reviews done by many serious reviewers and we deeply appreciate their service and support towards the development of IMDS journal. Finally, we wish to thank all the authors who overwhelmingly submitted their research findings to our call for papers which made to see the evidence regarding the popularity of topic and journal’s impact among readers.

Note

www.supplymanagement.com/news/2014/internet-of-things-will-significantly-alter-supply-chains

Reference

Tiwana, A., Konsynski, B. and Venkatraman, N. (2013), “Information technology and organizational governance: the IT governance cube”, Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 30 No. 3, pp. 7-12

About the Guest Editors

Dr Angappa Gunasekaran is a Professor and the Dean at the Charlton College of Business, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Dr Gunasekaran has held academic positions in UK, Australia, Finland, India and Canada. He has over 250 articles published in peer-reviewed journals. He has presented about 50 papers and published 50 articles in conferences and given a number of invited talks in many countries. He is on the editorial board of several journals. He has organized several international workshops and conferences in the emerging areas of operations management and information systems. He is currently interested in researching logistics and supply chain management. Dr Gunasekaran has been the founding Director of Business Innovation Research Center (BIRC) since 2006.

Dr Nachiappan Subramanian is an Associate Professor in Operations Management at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China. Nachi has 17 years of academic experience and two years of industrial experience. He has post-doctoral research experience at the University of Nottingham, UK, RMIUT University Melbourne, Australia, and the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India. He has received several research fellowship awards including the BOYSCAST Fellowship, Career Award and Young Scientist Fellowship Award from Indian government agencies as well as the Australian Endeavour Research Fellowship Award. He has obtained several research grants and successfully supervised seven research scholars till now. Nachiappan has published over 50 refereed research papers in leading operations and supply chain management journals. He also serves as a reviewer to many leading journals and has guest edited several special issues in leading operations management journals. Dr Nachiappan Subramanian is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: mailto:Nachiappan.Subramanian@nottingham.edu.cn

Dr Manoj Tiwari is a Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He has published more than 238 research articles (Scopus H-index-34) in leading operations and supply chain management journals. His research interests are manufacturing planning and scheduling, logistics and supply chain analysis, computational intelligence in manufacturing and logistics and optimization and simulation. He has authored several books and organized many international events. He has been rated as Rank 1 among top 100 individual researchers across the world, who had published research articles in International Journal of Production Research (Taylor&Francis) during the time period 1985-2010. International Journal of Production Research, Volume 51, Issue 23-24, 2013. He is serving in top journals editorial board as an Editor, Associate Editor or as a Member. He is listed among Top 20 Most Productive Authors in the area of production and operations management as reported in the last 50 years (published in a survey article in International Journal of Production Economics, 2009, 120, 540-551) and rated second among many researchers working in logistics and supply chain management in India (Analysis of the logistics Research in India-White paper published in the TU Dortmund University, Dortmund Germany-2012).