Improved Information Exchange as an Advanced Governance Tool

Whereas many organisations focus on the optimal functioning of their processes to achieve their goals, we nowadays see organisational challenges spreading to their functioning within networks. This poses a significant question for management and leadership: Are their decisions shaping or controlling their own or the network partners’ functioning? However, modern networks grant partners autonomy to make their choices, believing that the collective outcome of these autonomous decision processes can also yield results. However, cooperative decision-making between network partners is pivotal in today's society. Finding a balance between control over the network, autonomy of the partners and cooperation between them leads to what is often referred to as the emergent behaviour of the network. So, 'context is leading' requires reacting fast and efficiently to become a resilient organisational network. It is becoming evident that the resilience within network functioning lies in the exchange of information and data availability. In current practice, partners often seek solutions by striving for unity of language and/or data dictionaries. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t lead to optimal results in day-to-day practice. We propagate the adoption of a different approach. This article presents a non-invasive perspective on micro-contexts and their emerging information systems. By engaging these systems in their current form through formalised abstractions, we suggest effectively linking information and data sources to enhance information exchange and data availability. Improving information exchange will show itself instantly as an advanced governance tool