Integrating On-chain and Off-chain Governance for Supply Chain Transparency and Integrity
This work addresses the problem of fragmented governance in supply chain systems for stakeholders seeking enhanced transparency and integrity, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain concepts without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackles the challenge of ensuring transparency and integrity in blockchain-based supply chains by proposing an integrated data governance framework that coordinates on-chain and off-chain rules and decision-making processes, demonstrated through a Proof-of-Concept.
Integrating on-chain and off-chain data storage for decentralised and distributed information systems, such as blockchain, presents specific challenges for providing transparency of data governance and ensuring data integrity through stakeholder engagement. Current research on blockchain-based supply chains focuses on using on-chain governance rules developed for cryptocurrency blockchains to store some critical data points without designing tailored on-chain governance mechanisms and disclosing off-chain decision-making processes on data governance. In response to this research gap, this paper presents an integrated data governance framework that coordinates supply chain stakeholders with inter-linked on-chain and off-chain governance to disclose on-chain and off-chain rules and decision-making processes for supply chain transparency and integrity. We present a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) of our integrated data governance approach and suggest future research to strengthen scaling up and supply chain-based use cases based on our learnings.