The Governance of Collaborative Ecosystems

Abstract

The digital society increasingly demands for integrated ICT transformations. Societal, technical, and institutional developments enable interorganisational and cross-sectoral integration of digital services. However, a lack of trust and legal certainty impedes electronic transactions and the development and adoption of innovative digital services. Digital trust services counter this by providing solutions for secure and trustworthy electronic transactions, which benefits the electronic society. As the development of digital trust services have the risk to develop in isolated manner, interoperability is required to allow wide adoption of these services. Collaborative ecosystems are dynamic and co-evolving communities of interdependent stakeholders, and could support valorisation of digital trust services. Nonetheless, stakeholders participating in such an ecosystem pursue different interests while envisioning different ecosystem operations. Governance contributes to efficient and effective ecosystem orchestration by providing rules on decision-making processes. In addition, the governance needs to fit with the technical architecture of an ecosystem, meanwhile, it assesses external factors and the development through time. The challenges of designing a governance model for collaborative ecosystems are relatively unexplored, as literature is sparse. Therefore, this thesis aims to design a framework which analyses and mitigates the challenges in a current collaborative ecosystem by prescribing a fitting governance model which adapts to its context through time. By following Hevner’s Design Science Research approach, the following main research question is aspired to be answered: ”How to design a governance model for a collaborative ecosystem which facilitates electronic transactions?”. By applying this framework to the current collaborative ecosystem of the Trusted Information Partners (TIP) initiative in the Netherlands, the framework is evaluated and validated. The study affirms that a framework should cogitate three components when designing a governance model for a collaborative ecosystem facilitating electronic transactions: I) Identifying the governance tensions enables context setting of factors affecting the ecosystem, II) Prescribing governance mechanisms boosts the mitigation of power dynamics, and III) Pursuing governance consistency checks whether proper governance takes place in decision-making. The framework contributes to the knowledge base of governance networks, because the research provides building blocks for establishing a governance model for collaborative ecosystems. To boost the service delivery of collaborative ecosystems, the framework could be validated by applying it to an operative collaborative ecosystem. As where the framework currently focusses on a developing ecosystem, the insights of an operative ecosystem can increase the generalisability of the framework. Future research on this can provide further alignment between the functioning of ecosystems and the governance model. Applying improved framework versions to other digital ecosystems, could also stimulate the valorisation of trusted services in society as a whole.