Information sharing in humanitarian supply chain management : the case of refugees crisis in Jordan

Information sharing entails exchange of timely and accurate information exchange among supply chain partners to ensure effective and efficient humanitarian logistics and the overall supply chain management (SCM) for successful relief operation. The process is essential for strategic planning and decision making to ensure effective operations, including timely and better response to affected population and increased performance at minimal costs across the supply chain relationships. This study explored information sharing barriers of supply chain management between humanitarian organizations in Jordan at the horizontal level of coordination using qualitative research design. The researcher was mainly motivated by the ineffective and uncoordinated operational relationships of the HSCM largely because of lack of information sharing; and limited research on information sharing barriers at horizontal level of SCM. Prior to main field activity, the researcher performed a pilot study on humanitarian situation in Jordan. The main field activity collected primary data using semi-structured interviews from research participants representing a total of eight case studies of humanitarian organizations in Jordan while secondary data was collected from literature, organizational documents (e.g.booklet and reports) and websites. Data analysis employed two-stage within case and cross-case thematic analysis. The results showed that information sharing was limited by diverse barriers related to managerial, organizational, technical, financial, and socio-cultural and religious barriers. These barriers had varied relationship with information sharing from case to case despite that organizational related barriers to information sharing were the most common, then technical barrier, managerial, quality, socio-cultural and religious barriers, financial barrier, language and opportunistic barriers. ii This study recommends various strategic interventional measures that may promote effective and efficient humanitarian logistics and the overall supply chain management (SCM) for successful relief operation. These include engaging in collaborative relationships among supply partners so as to access critical and missing information and/or knowledge at organizational level to promote cooperation and supply chain efficiencies; joint investment in specific assets, including electronic data interchange as well as effective governance mechanisms deployment; sharing information based on conducive environmental conditions that promote organizational performance; adopt mechanisms for sharing resources such as information and knowledge while maintaining autonomy over other organizations; and eliminating opportunistic related risks by using formal contracts with incentives and penalties to safeguard asset-specific investments while promoting information processing and sharing capabilities. Moreover, the study concludes that there is need for humanitarian actors to establish collaborative information sharing strategy to ensure effective supply chain relationships and increased performance, including timely and better response to the target population. Overall, this study is important since it provides insight on different levels of information sharing based on different evidence based strategies and effective mechanisms to ensure better operations. Moreover, the contributes new knowledge to information sharing of humanitarian supply chain management particularly and Business supply chain management at horizontal level given that only few studies have focused on this research area.