Digital Business Ecosystems: Organizational Model, Roles, and Governance Towards Flexibility

Abstract

Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) enable digital platforms to support companies’ collaboration in shared markets. This novel organization form facilitates and accelerates exchanges, which modifies B2B relationships. The main question is how to enable flexibility of these relationships when data sharing needs to expand the traditional supply chain roles of “supplier” and “customer”? To answer this question, we conducted several interviews to collect data from the French banking industry to build a future organizational model of DBE detailing the extended roles and rules of cooperation. These roles imply reciprocal data sharing from customers to suppliers in exchange for incentives or remuneration. Firstly, we propose a high-level organizational model of DBE, including the list of functions, actors, and requirements. Secondly, we conceptualize the DBE participant as an actor being both a customer and supplier simultaneously. Third, we propose a matrix to enable governance for digital business ecosystems. We contribute to flexible systems management by building a high-level organizational model detailing the roles and governance rules. We believe this model will support the fair distribution of resources, respect common and individual goals, and attain more sustainability with a concentration on the core processes of actors.