Exploring Influences on Information Sharing in Supply Chains : A Scenario Planning Study

Many managers would argue that today’s business environment is bothrapidly changing and increasingly complex. To be able to deal with thisenvironment, organizations and supply chains need to be prepared to makecoordinated decisions on actions on how to handle possible future events.To coordinate decisions in organizations and along supply chains,information sharing is required. Practitioners are aware that the future holdspossibilities and challenges for information sharing in supply chains. Thus,they need to ask themselves which possibilities and challenges the futurewill bring for information sharing and how to handle them.The overall purpose of this research is to provide practitioners andacademics with a sense of direction and preparedness for an uncertainfuture regarding information sharing. The research is based on a singlestudy that uses an intuitive-logic scenario planning technique to identifytrends and create scenarios of plausible futures for information sharing insupply chains.In total 21 trends were identified in the domains of information andcommunications technology (ICT), information, politics and opinion,organization, and socio-economy. This research provides insights into thesetrends and gives an indication of uncertainties that potentially will beimportant to consider in the future. Moreover, the results indicate futurebenefits and challenges for information sharing.For practitioners, this research can be used as a means for understandingplausible futures and coming events. It also provides practitioners withscenarios that can be used as a foundation for decision support andpreparedness for an uncertain future, thus providing insights for riskmanagement, long-term planning and strategy building. The identificationof trends contributes to the limited existing literature dealing with trends inlogistics and supply chain management in general and information sharingin supply chains in particular. Moreover, the developed scenarios indicatepotential future research foci. The research makes a methodologicalcontribution as it provides a glance into how to use intuitive-logic scenario planning to explore a given topic in logistics and supply chain managementresearch