Interoperability is a governance problem, not a technology problem.

Every year this sector spends real money making systems talk to each other, and every year the systems talk to each other slightly better while the organizations behind them go on operating in parallel. The conclusion I have reached, and the research I know best supports it, is that we keep buying a technical answer to a question that was never technical.

The study looked at collaboration between UN agencies. Ten existing initiatives reviewed, from joint air transport to shared warehousing, and 36 senior supply chain leaders interviewed across six UN agencies, three shared service organizations, eight international organizations and three private-sector firms. Around twenty hours of interviews, 482 pages of transcript, more than 2,200 coded segments. The question was simple. Collaboration works in some places and stalls in others. Why.

The barriers that came back were competition for funding and visibility, weak incentives to collaborate, organizational and operational differences, and resistance to change. Read that list again and notice what is not on it. Not one of those is a systems problem. You cannot procure your way out of any of them.

The drivers were the mirror image. Trust between organizations. Recognition that collaboration actually pays. Pressure from outside. And sustained commitment from senior leadership, which is the only one on the list that a person in my position can supply directly, and the one most likely to evaporate when that person moves on.

So why does the technology answer keep winning? Because it is purchasable. It has a vendor, a price, a delivery date and a name you can put in a report. Governance work has none of those. Changing who is permitted to decide produces no artifact, appears in no budget line, and cannot be announced. Faced with a choice between a problem you can buy your way out of and a problem you have to negotiate your way out of, any organization under funding pressure picks the first one, and picks it in good faith.

The study found the highest interoperability potential sits in data and information management, and in processes, because almost every other kind of collaboration rests on them. That reads like a technical finding and it is not. A data standard is an agreement about whose definitions win. An interface between two agencies is an agreement about who has to change. A shared process is an agreement about who gives up a way of working they built and still prefer. Every one of those is a governance decision wearing a technical costume, and the technical part is the easy part.

This is the same structure I argue about localization, arriving through a different door. There too the sector explains a stalled reform by pointing at capability, and there too the actual constraint is who is permitted to decide and what they are rewarded for. Both times the comfortable explanation is the one that requires nobody to give anything up.

I want to be precise about what I am not saying. Systems matter. Bad tooling wastes people, and there are agencies running procurement on spreadsheets that should not be. But a system is an amplifier. Put a good one on top of an arrangement where two agencies have no incentive to align and no authority to agree, and you get the same non-collaboration, faster and with better dashboards. Digital maturity that leaves the decision rights exactly where they were is an expensive way to stand still.

The practical consequence is a sequencing rule. Before funding the integration, name the decision it requires and find the person who can make it. If that person does not exist, or exists but is measured on something the collaboration would cost them, the integration will be delivered, celebrated, and quietly unused. I have watched that happen often enough to stop treating it as bad luck.

There is one more thing in the finding that is easy to skip past. The research deliberately did not propose new institutional structures. It looked at whether existing mechanisms could be strengthened, extended or better aligned. That was a constraint set at the beginning, and it is the right one, because the sector's reflex when coordination fails is to build a new coordinating body, which adds a party to every future negotiation and calls it progress.

Here is the part that cost me something. We funded that study and we did not run it. It was designed, conducted and written by an academic researcher who held full responsibility for the analysis, on an advisory board where we held two seats out of nine. The comfortable finding for a supply chain advisory organization is that the sector needs better supply chain systems and more advice about them. That is not what came back. What came back says the constraint is governance and incentives, which is slower work, harder to sell, and much harder to show a donor at the end of a year. We published it anyway, in full.

The full argument runs through Pathways and Power: who decides, whose name is on it, and what holds that in place.

Nathan Kunz, Strengthening Interoperability and Collaboration in Humanitarian Supply Chains. Advancing Inter-Agency Coordination across the United Nations, Research Report, May 2026. Funded by HELP Logistics.