Community Systems – Digital Platforms in transshipment hubs

In the context of ports and other transshipment hubs, a special kind of digital platform is the focus of this thesis: the so-called Community Systems (CS). The most prominent type of such digital platforms, Port Community Systems (PCS), facilitate seamless communication and information exchange among various stakeholders involved in the port and maritime industry. These systems play a crucial role in streamlining and optimizing port operations, enhancing collaboration, and improving overall efficiency. PCS act as a centralized hub, connecting different entities like port authorities, shipping lines, freight forwarders, customs agencies, terminal operators, and other related organizations. By providing a common platform, PCS enable these stakeholders to share real-time data, documents, and information about various aspects of port operations such as vessel schedules, cargo status, customs clearance, and container tracking. One of the primary benefits of PCS is that they eliminate the need for manual, paper-based processes and enable the adoption of electronic documentation. This helps in reducing administrative burden, minimizing errors and delays, and ensuring greater accuracy in data exchange. PCS also enable better coordination and collaboration between various parties involved in port operations. For instance, shipping lines can view the availability of berths and plan vessel schedules accordingly, while terminal operators can easily allocate resources based on real-time information about cargo arriving at the port. Importers and exporters can track the movement of their goods and ascertain their status at any given time. Taken together, this thesis is motivated by two overarching research questions that focus on what characterizes CS, how they are different from other digital B2B platforms, how adoption and diffusion of CS have been studied and how standards are developed and adopted in the context of CS. To answer these questions, three studies have been conducted and published as part of this dissertation. The first article aims to gain insights and give an overview of the existing literature body on Community Systems. As a first result in regards to the ORQ, it shows that extant research mostly distinguishes CS based on their physical location, namely „Port Community Systems“ (PCS) at seaports and „Cargo Community System” (CCS) or “Airport Community System” (ACS) at airports (Carlan et al., 2016). Most digital platforms that have been studied in the past do not – in parts due to their digital nature – have a physical location attributed to them. Extant research has focused on CS at seaports predominantly, but their peculiarities and differences have mostly been neglected. A total of 97 factors were identified from extant literature that have an influence on the adoption and diffusion of CS. It is uncovered how CS adoption and diffusion research has a different focus compared to IS innovation adoption and diffusion research. Yet, it remains difficult to compare and generalize the results from the various CS research papers as the differences between the studied CS remains ambiguous. The lacking holistic view of studies has been criticized before (A. Moros-Daza et al., 2020) and reality has overtaken research in the past years as a multitude of CS seem to be in very different development stages and trajectories (Elbert & Tessmann, 2021) which has not been thematized in extant literature before this thesis. Based on the comparison between the focus of IS innovation adoption and CS adoption research, it is concluded that IS innovation adoption research could benefit from challenging some of the underlying assumptions of key models and theories. One major conclusion of the literature review is, that a CS taxonomy would allow differentiating the platforms based on distinguishing characteristics which would help structure future research. The second article tackles the identified research gap from the first article, namely a taxonomy of CS and their respective business models. The article derives a taxonomy from studying 44 out of 77 identified CS that have sufficient information available. A total of 18 dimensions with 62 characteristics emerged from the taxonomy creation process. Based on a cluster analysis approach, four CS archetypes are identified, namely “Innovation-oriented port eco-systems”, “B2B-focused CS”, “Non-profit CS” and “Non-specialized Single Windows”. Each of those archetypes shows a different focus and therefore distribution of the characteristics of the taxonomy. The author hopes that the developed taxonomy and the identified archetypes of CS will help future research to better structure and therefore understand the mechanisms of CS development, adoption and future trajectory as it will be easier to clearly distinguish CS from each other but also from other B2B-MSP. The third and last article investigates in a multiple case study how standards are developed and adopted within the more and more complex platform eco-systems. As shown in the previous articles, the interconnectedness of modern CS made them develop into platforms with an attached eco-system. The article applies a broad understanding of “standard”, as it is not be limited to a certain type of standard, such as accredited standards that are defined by an SDO such as ISO. The article studies three cases, two of which are digital (localized) freight exchanges, so CS with a strong B2B focus (“B2B-focused CS”) and no governmental involvement. The third case is an international exchange platform that connects multiple PCS with each other, so falls under the “Innovation-oriented port eco-systems”. Two aspects of standardization are studied jointly that commonly are not investigated together, namely the mode of standardization and the adoption of the defined standard. The latter is particularly important as a standard that has been defined but is mostly neglected by its intended audience, is less relevant. Based on 19 interviews and a systematic coding procedure, 24 factors are identified that either influence the mode of standardization, the adoption of standards or both. Those factors are then clustered into four overarching themes. Especially for the adoption of standards, the article unveils the relatedness between standardization and innovation research as both can rely on a similar theoretical foundation which has not been utilized widely in standardization research. From the four overarching themes, the standard characteristics are identified as the most important factors influencing both the mode of standardization but also the standard adoption. Overall, this means that, for example, the type of standard has a significant influence on the mode of standardization that should be chosen but also on the likelihood of its adoption. As a major result, the article shows that standardization has to be seen as a dynamic and interconnected process, as some factors and their outcomes are interdependent which means that these factors should be actively managed over time, but the article also shows that the controllability varies significantly between factors. Overall, this thesis is one of the first attempts to understand the specifics and potentials of Community Systems (CS) with their peculiarities while combining Information Systems, Transportation and Standardization Research. It provides novel insights on how digital B2B platforms differ from their B2C and C2C counter parts and it will be interesting to see in future research why these platforms developed so differently. Apart from the various contributions to extant research, the dissertation also provides valuable insights for practitioners working in the context of CS specifically, or digital B2B platforms in general, showcasing different business model trajectories, the influences of standards in digital platform eco-systems or factors influencing the adoption and diffusion of such platforms.