Enhancing Trust in Inter-Organisational Data Sharing: Levels of Assurance for Data Trustworthiness

Abstract: As data is increasingly acknowledged as a highly valuable asset, much effort has been put into investigating inter-organisational data sharing, aiming at utilising the value of formerly unused data. Moreover, most researchers agree, that trust between actors is key for successful data sharing activities. However, existing research oftentimes focus on trust from a data provider perspective. Therefore, our work highlights the unbalanced view of trust, addressing it from a data consumer perspective. More specifically, our aim is to investigate trust enhancing measures on a data level, that is data trustworthiness. We found, that existing data trustworthiness enhancing solutions do not meet the requirements of the domain of inter-organisational data sharing. Therefore, our study addresses this gap. Conducting a rigorous design science research approach, this work proposes a new Levels of Assurance for Data Trustworthiness artifact. Built on existing artifacts, we demonstrate, how it addresses the identified challenges within the domain appropriately. We found that our novel approach requires more work to be suitable for adoption. Still, we are confident that our solution can increase consumer trust. We conclude by contributing to the body of design knowledge and emphasise the need for more attention to be put into consumer trust.