Inter-organisational information sharing : Between a rock and a hard place

Although inter-organisational collaboration is common, most information security (IS) research has focused on IS issues within organisations. Confidentiality, integrity of data and availability (CIA) and responsibility, integrity of role, trust, and ethicality (RITE) are two sets of principles for managing IS that have been developed from an intra-organisational, rather static, perspective. The aim of this paper is thus to investigate the relation between the CIA and RITE principles in the context of an inter-organisational collaboration, i.e., collaboration between organisations. To this end we investigated inter-organisational collaboration and information sharing concerning Swedish cooper corrosion research in the field a long-term nuclear waste disposal. We found that in an inter-organisational context, responsibility, integrity of role and ethicality affected the CIA-principles, which in turn affected the collaborating actors’ trust in each other over time.