Twentieth International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

The advancement of information technology, sophisticated networks, and Big data systems has created unprecedented opportunities for organisations to integrate with critical stakeholders and generate a competitive advantage through strategic information systems. The entire value chain of an organisation is managed based on information systems providing an advantage through efficiency improvements created by integrating with supply chain and distribution systems. Nevertheless, the use of information and communication technology has made it possible to assimilate the supply chains to ensure real-time connectivity amongst suppliers, producers, distributors, retailers, customers and third parties to generate better productivity at a lower operational cost. However, the integration of the value chain with external parties through the organisational database and big data systems has created a higher risk to data privacy. The sensitive information of an organisation is accessible by third parties due to sharing a common platform for data collection and processing through the network. Therefore, the vital information on business processes, production systems, human resource planning and on critical decisions may be exposed to third party organisations including direct competitors creating significant damage to the future strategy of an organisation. Maintaining data privacy will be a daunting task for organisations as the networks and big data systems indicate a higher vulnerability for unauthorised access and hacking. The objective of this research is to identify the privacy concerns of organisations and design a conceptual framework as a best practice to ensure adequate data protection to facilitate the smooth functioning of the integrated value chain.