Governance of Collaborative Networked Organisations: Stakeholder Requirements

The digital transformation of industry provides opportunities for increased collaboration. Utilising the increasing power of communications and access to information, various collaborative networked organisations are established to respond quickly to emerging market demands while sharing resources and risk. The governance of such organisations remains a significant challenge. Therefore, in the process of designing a governance model for a cybersecurity network, a research team in the Horizon 2020 ECHO project pursued several venues to identify and prioritise governance needs and objectives. This paper presents the approach to soliciting the views of two groups of stakeholders - funding organisations and potential major customers of cybersecurity products and services - by conducting semi-structured interviews. The research method included quantitative and qualitative techniques for processing the interviews, allowing to prioritise governance requirements from an initial list and to identify additional governance issues. As a result, the geographic representation in the networked organisation, the involvement of external stakeholders, the decision-making arrangements, and the need to provide for confidentiality emerged as governance issues of highest concern, followed by supply chain security, representation on the senior governance bodies, auditing, management of disputes and intellectual property rights, setting up an ethics code and policies for gender representation, transparency, accountability, and integrity.