On the Inattention to Digital Confidentiality in Operations and Supply Chain Research

Digital assets are growing in scale, scope, and importance, amplifying the necessity to maintain their confidentiality. Yet, digital confidentiality has received vastly less research attention from operations and supply chain management (OSCM) scholars than cost, quality, flexibility, delivery, and innovation. We contend that this lack of attention has, at least partly, produced recommendations that ultimately could harm digital confidentiality performance. To guide future research, we synthesize relevant gaps across the OSCM and information systems literatures and discuss relevant OSCM research opportunities. Many of these opportunities are articulated as propositions. We also discuss contemporary industry practices aimed at upholding digital confidentiality. We call for the OSCM community to consistently and explicitly examine digital confidentiality as a performance dimension, and argue that failure to heed this call will be detrimental to our field's influence and relevance as digital assets continue to increase in value relative to physical ones.