Digital technologies enable novel models of social and business interactions, where trust becomes a critical design consideration. A thorough analysis of trust issues and their implications at different enterprise levels, including strategies, processes and technological solutions, becomes an imperative part of socio-technical systems design. In this study we examine trust issues that emerge among the actors of a Digital Business Ecosystems (DBE) which, if not properly addressed, can jeopardize DBE functioning and resilience. An explicit mapping between the generic DBE roles and the social factors of trustworthiness is the main contribution of this work. We demonstrate how this mapping is used in the analysis of trust issues in the context of a Higher Education Alliance DBE. This analysis leads to the identification of explicit trustworthiness requirements that can guide (re)design of DBE strategies, processes and technical platforms.
Business ecosystem refers to the interconnected business network of organizations and individuals
that interact with and influence each other within a particular industry or market. It encompasses the
complex web of relationships, resources, and interactions among various entities that collectively
contribute to the functioning and success of the overall business environment. With the digital
transformation and the increasing role of digital technologies in social interactions, the concept of
digital business ecosystem (DBE) has emerged. In a DBE, entities interact and collaborate using digital
technologies, and leverage data and information as key assets [
DBEs are characterized by their dynamic and rapidly evolving nature. They require effective
governance mechanisms to ensure fairness, trust, and accountability among the participants.
Governance involves setting common rules, standards, and protocols for data exchange, resource
sharing, and collaboration, as well as resolving conflicts, ensuring compliance, and managing risks
within the DBE. A key aspect of DBEs is the diversity of actors and the roles they fulfill: in addition
to the roles acting in traditional business networks, such as supplier, customer, and end user, DBEs
rely in addition on some specific ones, such as for example - the driver role, for managing the tools
that support the DBE; a governor, for providing and/or defining the standards and policies; a
reputation guardian - for assessing all DBE actors' trustworthiness, reliability, solvency, and
worthiness; as well as several other roles [
In DBE digital technology (“D”) acts as a mediator in interactions between the ecosystem
participants, with the expectation of increasing trust between them and for providing them with a
positive experience [
In social science, trust is described as a situation in which an individual or an organization (trustor)
is willing to rely on the chosen actions of another individual or organization (trustee) [
The gap between the social and technical definitions of trust arises due to the challenges of translating a subjective, context-dependent nature of social trust into objective, measurable terms that can be addressed by technical mechanisms. While technical (or digital) trust can provide a foundation for secure and reliable digital interactions, it may not fully capture the complexities of social trust that arise from human relationships, emotions, and cultural factors.
DBEs are inherently socio-technical systems, and addressing trust in DBE requires a holistic approach that integrates both social and technical dimensions of trust. Bridging the gap between these dimensions involves recognizing the interplay between different types of trust, understanding the subjective and contextual nature of trust issues, and leveraging both social and technical mechanisms to foster trust in DBEs. The goal of this work is to explicitly address trust and its implications in DBE design.
In this paper, we examine the roles of DBE and discuss their trust relationships. First, we associate the DBE roles with social trustworthiness factors. To bridge the gap between the social and technical dimensions of trust, we propose a mapping of (social) trust issues into trustworthiness requirements (TwR) that can guide DBE design. We define trustworthiness requirements as the expectations of one actor (trustor) about trustworthiness of another actor (trustee) in a DBE. We demonstrate our findings with a case study of European universities forming a higher-education (HE) alliance, which fulfills the main criteria for being considered a DBE. We examine the trust building process among the actors of this DBE, focusing on the implications on the supporting information systems. We formulate the following research questions: • •
RQ1: What are the social factors of trust defining relationships among DBE actors? RQ2: What are the trustworthiness requirements that guide the design and development of a DBE and its supporting systems for the case of a HE alliance?
In order to formulate the TwR for a particular role in the HE alliance DBE, first, we analyze the
trust issues expressed by a corresponding DBE participant and their (social) trust factors, then we use
a reference list of TwR derived from the literature [
The remainder of this article is organized as follows: in section 2, we discuss the background of this study and its related works; in section 3, we provide a mapping of the generic DBE roles on the trustworthiness factors defined in social science. We also describe our approach for trustworthiness requirements elicitation. In section 4 we present our findings on the case study of higher-education alliance. In section 5 we discuss our results and provide our conclusions.
2.1. Trust
In the research literature on trust, the act of trust is represented as a relationship between a subject
(the trustor) and an object of trust (the trustee) [
Whereas researchers in social sciences focus on trust between social entities (individuals, groups or organizations), in IS research, trust is considered as a socio-technical concept, i.e., it is defined as a relationship between social entities and technological components (information systems, applications, infrastructure, etc.), in which a technological component can be either an object (trustee) or a subject (trustor).
In modern organizations, social trust remains an important determinant of collaboration and
decision making. With a constant digital transformation, trust issues that occur among social actors
on the strategic and operational levels of the organizations are often addressed by socio-technical
solutions developed by the IT, creating a gap between the social and technology-centric perspectives
of trust. To bridge this gap, it is important to recognize the multidimensional nature of trust and
consider the social and cultural contexts in which technological systems are developed and used [
transparency, traceability, / control
transaction in digital environnement
It addresses the (social) context where the trust issues among the actors arise. [
Digital trust and trust in technology define trust in the technological domain. The trustworthiness
factors of technology include usability, functionality, helpfulness, reliability and credibility of
information [
While trustworthiness factors of digital trust and trust in technology can be formalized, measured and used to provide a foundation for technological solutions, they may not fully capture the complexities of social trust that arise from human relationships, emotions, and cultural factors. Thus, an explicit mapping between technological and social perspectives of trust is of great importance.
Requirements engineering (RE) discipline plays a crucial role in design and development of
sociotechnical systems. The RE process involves understanding the stakeholders' needs and expectations,
as well as the social and organizational context in which the system will operate [
In this study, we examine the social trustworthiness factors that define interactions among DBE actors. First, we provide a mapping between these factors and generic DBE roles. Then, using the case study, we illustrate how the trustworthiness factors of the trustee in a DBE can be addressed by the TwRs. As a result, we identify requirements that need to be met by the DBE roles and their supporting digital solutions, providing guidance for DBE design and evolution.
Actors, roles, capabilities, relationships, and digital components are essential elements of DBE [
Roles of archetypal kind are of a high significance for the ecosystem’s design as they define the
DBE-specific responsibilities of the actors involved and provide underlying knowledge for the
capabilities relevant to a DBE. In [
Reputation Guardian surveys and assesses all DBE actors' trustworthiness, reliability, solvency, and worthiness.
This study follows the Design Science Research [
We conduct a structured analysis of the archetype DBE roles and identify the trustworthiness
factors that determine the interactions between these roles. The resulting mapping (Table 3) is one of
the framework components developed in this study. Following the identified trustworthiness factors,
we proceed with identification of trustworthiness requirements (TwR) that can be further
operationalized (i.e., implemented as a part of an interactive process or a supporting information
system between the corresponding DBE roles). To this end, we propose and follow a process for trust
analysis (Section 3.3). This process takes trust issues expressed by the specific DBE actors as an input
and leads to identification of their corresponding TwR. To support the trust analysis, we use a set of
generic TwR from [
We demonstrate the designed artifact by examining trust in the Higher-Education Alliance DBE
– our case study (Section 4). In this article, we provide the results of trust analysis for the Modular
Producer role in this DBE. In particular, we show the trust issues (collected from the case),
trustworthiness factors (application of our mapping), generic TwR (from [
In DBE, trust relationships are formed among their participants (social entities) and can be characterized by the following: (i) several entities can share the same DBE role and each entity can fulfill several DBE roles; (ii) within different interactions, each DBE role can be considered as a trustor (one who trusts) or as a trustee (one to be trusted).
Following [
Based on our previous studies on DBEs [
The MP (trustor) - Driver (trustee) interaction in DBE is important to ensure consistent development and evolution of a service or product provided by the DBE. A, B, I in the cell {3,1} indicate that all the three factors – ability, benevolence and integrity - need to be considered when designing processes and digital platforms supporting and mediating their interactions.
Trustworthiness factors in MP – Aggregator and MP - Complementor interactions (cells {3,2}{3,4} in Table 3) include ability (A) (e.g., skills/competences of an aggregator to collect and combine capabilities and resources within a DBE) and integrity (I) (e.g., aggregator’s honesty, capacity to adhere to the rules defined by DBE).
Integrity (I) is the major factor in MP – MP and MP - Customer interactions (cells {3,3}{3,5} in Table 3). Here, integrity of MP refers to their perceived honesty in delivering a high-quality service/product. Customers’ integrity refers to their perceived honesty and compliance with the rules.
Trustworthiness factors in MP - Governor interactions include benevolence (B) and integrity (I). This is related to the responsibility of the governor as a trustee, which is to oversee all the actors within a DBE (Table 2).
Benevolence (B) is the major factor in MP - Reputation guardian interactions. The responsibility of the reputation guardian as a trustee is to survey and assess all DBE actors (see Table 2) and benevolence (e.g., a belief that this evaluation will be fair) provides a major contribution in building trust in these interactions.
Trustworthiness factors are not applicable to MP (trustor) - End user (trustee) interactions (indicated n/a in the cell {3,6}) since, by definition, MP role in DBE does not “rely on” or “become vulnerable from” the End user. Note that the opposite is not true: End user as a trustee has to trust the MP's ability to produce a competitive, relevant service or product. This is reflected by the ability (A) trustworthiness factor in Table 3 (cell {6,3}). The rest of the table can be interpreted the similar way.
1. Identify trust issue(s) of a trustor actor. This step is context-specific and can vary for different partners in the DBE. The working approach can be: empirical analysis of DBE design and operations or interviews with stakeholders. 2. Identify the trustworthiness factors of the trustee role related to this issue. This step is context-independent and defined for generic roles in DBE, c.f. Table 3. 3. Formulate TwR that express trustor’s expectations about trustee’s (social) trustworthiness factors from step 2 by using (technical) trustworthiness properties (i.e., system or process qualities). This step can be considered as a context design. Here we are working with engineers of the DBE to analyze the existing DBE design. The requirements can be extracted from this context or identified using a more generic reference list, derived from the previous experiences or from the literature. 4. Contextualize the TwRs by associating them with the trust issues identified in step 1. In this step, we are focusing on specific requirements of actors and the DBE as a whole. Here, the TwRs from step 3 are refined following the interviews with the actors’ representatives and analysis of the usage data.
The expected outcome of this process is a set of explicit, contextualized TwRs that provide a reference to the social context and identify an operational, functional, design or other characteristic, which, according to trustor’s beliefs, positively impacts the trustworthiness of this trustee and interaction between the two. In the following section we illustrate this process with the case study of Higher-Education Alliance DBE.
During the past decade a plethora of university alliances in the domain of higher education have emerged, with more than 40 of such alliances in Europe. Some alliances focus mainly on student mobility (e.g., Erasmus+), while others are aiming at a united Europe university both in terms of teaching and research (e.g., CIVIS, 4EU+, Una Europa). The latter type is featured in our case study (by the active participation of the authors in one of the outlined alliances). Through their activities and collaboration, these alliances strive to actively promote fundamental rights, solidarity, democracy, social cohesion, cultural diversity, and active citizenship. Therefore, the business foundation of the HE alliances could be condensed into the following knowledge square: Education, Research, Innovation and Civic Engagement. The alliances are typically co-funded by the EU Commission and the member universities.
HE alliances perform and coordinate an extensive number and variety of activities including development of educational programs and modules at Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD levels; student, teacher, and researcher mobility; educational and scientific calls and events; thematic working nodes, theme-labs, promotion-related activities, governance, management of the digital infrastructure.
HE alliances conform to the concept of DBE, because they consist of a large number of independent and self-organizing actors collaborating on various business objectives on a DBE level as well as individually. A key aspect of DBEs is actors acting in complementary roles, which is essential to maintain DBE’s long-term resilience. Table 4 shows the mapping of the common actors of an HE alliance to their corresponding DBE roles and responsibilities.
To propose course curriculum, assign tasks to modular producers and monitor development.
To organize events (conferences, seminars), present curriculum, etc.
To make decisions on operative levels, to coordinate communications and tasks of the universities.
To make cooperation decisions that would be applied across the participating regions To collect and disseminate student voices for the best interests of students: it listens, exchanges and proposes ideas on how the alliance should develop.
To attend campus and online courses, take examinations, to do course evaluation Business member Citizen
First-contact student(s) at every member university. Regional organizations Customer and companies Regional citizens
Customer Communication Office
The alliance representative office in EC
To provide information about the alliance to potentially interested students.
To sponsor and attend some events of the alliance, provide guest lectures, etc.
To support co-creation of knowledge related to the curriculum content, collaboration with business, and other.
To encourage the participation of all stakeholders in building the envisioned university model.
In this section, we provide the trust analysis for the Modular Producer role (a faculty teacher or researcher) in a HE Alliance DBE. For the sake of brevity, we do not provide the analysis for the other roles in this paper.
Following the process of trust analysis (Section 3.3), we illustrate (1) the trust issues identified in
the interactions between Modular producer (as trustor) and other roles in the HE alliance DBE
(trustees) and (2) provide their mapping to the trustworthiness factors of DBE roles from Table 3.
Next, in (3), we use the taxonomy proposed in [
Modular producers (MP) in the HE alliance are members of teaching and research staff responsible for creating content for educational programs (course materials, practical works, projects etc.) and delivering the program to the end users. When creating common courses, one of the challenges is to ensure alignment, consistency, and uniform quality of the course modules among different MPs. Therefore, an issue expressed by a trustor-MP towards the other MPs (trustees) is: 1. I am concerned with the quality of modules provided by other modular producers. This issue is associated with integrity (I) of the MP role as a trustee in Table 3.
Another challenge is related to aggregation, dissemination and reuse of developed materials within common space, which are ensured by Aggregator (a node) as a trustee: 2. I am worried that the development of a common course will not follow the established milestones and deadlines. This issue is associated with integrity (I) and ability (A) of the Aggregator role in Table 3; 3. I want to make sure the aggregator will not put me in competition with another modular producers - associated with integrity (I); 4. I am concerned that, within a common course, my content can be used or modified without my knowledge - associated with integrity (I); 5. I am concerned about the integration efforts and evolution of my content: upload, update, formatting should be ensured by the aggregator - associated with ability.
Once the program is developed, MPs are also concerned with its running. The following example illustrates the trust concerns towards Driver (a university) as a trustee: 6. I am concerned that the digital platform for course provisioning and communication with students will work without errors - associated with the trustee’s ability (A).
Towards Complementor (a lab, a third-party technology provider for) as a trustee: 7. I am concerned with the quality of supporting services and their price (e.g., Virtual classrooms, examination tools) delivered by the complementor - associated with the trustee's ability (A). Towards Reputation Guardian (communication office in HE alliance): 8. I am concerned that a fair number of students, with adequate background and academic records will be attending the course - associated with benevolence (B) of a Reputation guardian.
Once the issues are identified (column 1 in Table 5) and associated with the trustworthiness factors
(column 2 in Table 5), we formulate the TwR of the MP (as a trustor) towards the DBE (column 3 in
Table 5). In [
Note that the issues can vary among the actors playing the same DBE role (e.g., different teachers in HE alliance); they can also be shared between the roles in the DBE (e.g., issue 2 is shared by the MP and the driver role).
The process above needs to be conducted for all DBE participants to collect the list of issues and requirements for each relevant trustor-trustee interaction in the DBE.
Auditability: Trustor must be able to validate the trustee’s compliance with the rules (e.g., by executing the audit, supervising the examining the execution traces, supervising the trustee's process at run time).
Performance: Trustee must ensure an efficient distribution of resources, with respect of defined timeframe and budget.
Compliance: Trustee has to adhere to rules, agreements or regulations.
(4) Contextualized TwR of reference Any faculty teacher (Modular Producer) in the node must be able to validate the quality of the class materials produced by their peers: fit to the program, alignment between the modules, etc. Every faculty teacher should be able to demonstrate the quality of the produced course materials.
A node (Aggregator) creates the educational programs, with respect to the program calendar and budget set by the steering committee (Governor).
A node acts according to the rules defined by the steering committee (Governor) and uses the standard solutions (e.g., digital
Integrity: Trustee must ensure correct and timely execution of activities, with respect to contract or process specifications.
Traceability: Trustor has to access all information related to provenance of a physical or information object accurately and trace it to its source.
Transparency: Trustee’s workflow must be transparent and documented. Trustee must provide an accessible and non-repudiable audit trail showing use, change and viewing of the data.
Integrity (data): Trustee must ensure the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of data over its entire life-cycle.
Automation of data processing: Trustee must minimize physical and maximize digital processing of data.
Interoperability: Trustee must show a capability to work with trustor.
Availability: All resources and software components needed for process/activity execution have to be available to the trustor, by the trustee.
Availability: All resources and software components needed for process/activity execution have to be available to the trustor.
Performance: Trustee must ensure an efficient distribution of resources, with respect of defined timeframe and budget.
Accountability: Trustee is held responsible for her actions and cannot deny them.
Authentication (data): Trustor must be able to determine the correctness and reliability of reported data (e.g., messages, events).
portal) delivered by a leading university (Driver).
A node demonstrates the program evolution to the steering committee and informs the students and faculty teachers about problems.
Faculty teacher and faculty researcher has to be able to access all the information related to other modular producers and to trace the produced content.
A node’s course development plan (e.g., workflow) must be transparent to the faculty teachers and explicitly documented.
A node must ensure the overall accuracy, completeness, and consistency of produced content over its entire lifecycle.
A node must minimize physical and maximize digital processing of course materials and to enable students (EndUser) to access it remotely.
A node must be able to process, store and correctly integrate any numeric content from the faculty teachers.
Digital platform for student and course management has to be available to students and faculty teachers. The content must be accessible which is ensured by the designated university (Driver).
All resources and software components needed for the course have to be available by the digital platform through a university, to faculty teachers.
Lab (Complementor) must ensure an efficient distribution of resources, with respect to defined timeframe and budget.
Steering committee is responsible for her actions in marketing, dissemination of the calls and student inscription to the program.
Faculty teachers must be able to determine the correctness and reliability of reported data (e.g., application/admission ratio, information on the students).
Trust is a critical enabler of business interactions facilitating effective collaboration, efficient resource utilization, adaptive behaviors, and collective effort towards common goals. Business networks, as inherently socio-technical systems, require a holistic approach for trust analysis that integrates its social and technical dimensions. This study attempts to bridge the gap between these dimensions by incorporating the subjective and contextual nature of trust in DBE designs and management principles. Identification and analysis of trust issues among the participants of a DBE is a crucial task with a great impact on the DBE sustainability and resilience; it must be conducted upfront and it requires adequate enterprise modeling methods and practices.
In this work, we proposed a framework for structured analysis of trust among the actors of DBE. We focused on the implications on the supporting digital platforms pervading any business interaction in a DBE setting. We consider that the proposed framework can be used to support (re)design of DBE and its supporting digital platforms as follows: • • • • •
A list of requirements aggregated per Trustee-role provides a vision of what the DBE expects from this given role.
A list of requirements aggregated per Trustor-role provides a vision of what this particular role expects from the DBE.
Prioritization of the TwRs by identifying the TwRs most frequently expressed.
Negotiation of the TwRs and identification of the minimal set of TwRs that will be satisfactory for a particular DBE.
Identification and assessment of alternative organizational and technical solutions to cover the set of TwRs.
The study is a part of an overall Design Science Research project aiming to develop and implement the models and methods for resilient DBE. Within this project, we are defining the artifacts needed for incorporating the trust aspect into the DBE design: the identification and mapping of the social trustworthiness factors on the DBE roles, and a process for trust analysis serving for deriving TwRs specific to the ecosystem in design. The proposed artifacts were demonstrated to validate their usability on the case of HE alliance - a typical example of a DBE, with its high autonomy, selforganization, and cost balance principles. Concerning limitations to this study, we have performed only the initial cycle of development – the problem has been analyzed in sufficient detail to establish requirements for the artifact and its initial version has been developed and validated in an artificial setting with real life case. While this gives input to assess the validity of the artefact in broad terms, systematic evaluation in naturalistic setting is also needed.
The immediate next work will comprise further refinement of the framework and experimentation, for example., on other DBEs, to assess possible improvements for the purpose of evaluation of the framework in artificial setting which is to be followed by improvements to the framework and the guidelines for use in order to integrate the framework with a method for DBE design [23]. Conference, RCIS 2023, Corfu, Greece, May 23–26, 2023, Proceedings (pp. 275-290). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. (2023) [22] Mohammadi, N., G.: Trustworthy Cyber-Physical Systems: A Systematic Framework towards
Design and Evaluation of Trust and Trustworthiness. Springer (2019) [23] Tsai, C.H., Zdravkovic, J., Stirna, J. (2023). A Meta-model for Digital Business Ecosystem Design.
In: Nurcan, S., Opdahl, A.L., Mouratidis, H., Tsohou, A. (eds) Research Challenges in Information Science: Information Science and the Connected World. RCIS 2023. LNBIP, vol 476. Springer, Cham.