Integrity and Transparency for Trustworthy Supply Chain
is an open question that is also inspiring new standards and sharing mechanisms to bring some consistency and predictability for offering and accessing claims data [ 15, 16, 17 ].
5 OPPORTUNITY TO INFLUENCE AND IMPROVE COORDINATION FOR CREATING INSIGHTFUL DATA CAPABILITIES
With some coordination across these efforts the gaps, overlaps, and inconsistencies between them could be addressed. Getting the appropriate organizations and individuals involved in the relevant standards efforts and the supporting communities around their use would help integrate new insights into supply chain information and open a whole new landscape of capabilities to both industry and government. Specifically, there is a collective opportunity to:
• influence the data standards and processes in these various areas to improve coordination and minimize overlap, conflict, and implementation effort as well as yield more valuable strategic perspectives across these various data;
• incentivize sharing of relevant information through the specification of data standards and protocols designed with support for trust and integrity; and
• work with data producers and maintainers to access, align, aggregate, integrate, potentially anonymize, and analyze these data to potentially extract new strategic value.
While draft concepts show potential value, these standards could offer visibility into the networks of supply chains and the products flowing through them as well as the inputs they require. Determining how to gain access to the data in the individual supply chains, aggregating that information, and aligning it for use as an anonymized source of information on the flow of goods and materials across supply chains is an unexplored aspect of these new types of data.
New types of information generation are motivated by sustainability laws and by other factors driving BOM usage. If they can be anonymized, collected, correlated, and analyzed it could provide deeper insights into the flow of goods and materials. This could offer insights into government and industry baseline information for use in planning and strategic analysis. It could inform both government and industry investments and future actions( whether to defensively mitigative or proactively exploit) where today only guesses and estimates are used.
The digitization and emergent sharing of these new sorts of data provide an opportunity for Government to better serve their missions through improved strategic understanding of relevant supply chains. This opportunity addresses economic, foreign interest, critical infrastructure, and national security acquisition concerns. Each of these organizations has a current high priority focus on improving their capabilities to understand such relevant supply chains. Additionally, most commercial firms have equities in understanding more about the supply chains that they are a part of and those that intersect with their suppliers as changes and stresses on their suppliers can impact their ability to deliver.
Journal of Innovation 65