The impact of diverse information systems environments on information quality - a design science approach

Information quality is an ever-increasing problem that many organisations must contend with. Despite investment in both technology and refinement of information systems the problem continues to escalate. The introduction of test driven software development methodologies and increased user proficiency has not improved the situation. The use of information systems for more and more business processes at all levels within a multitude of organisations has highlighted the ever increasing problems of information quality. The financial implications are enormous, prompting research from many disparate disciplines to examine the concept of information quality. Information system deployment has in recent years undergone radical change, the traditional deployment where the architecture, user and access device were known at the time of information systems development, have been replaced by a much more diverse environment. These diverse environments include web interfaces, traditional client server and a revolution with respect to mobile devices. The challenges of measuring information quality where diverse information systems access the same underlying databases are significant. Initial research with respect to information quality concentrated on accuracy and completeness of information. Seminal work in the area of information quality led to the development of Wang and Strongs information quality framework that expanded the number of individual dimensions to fifteen; the sum of which gave an overall level of information quality for an information system. However, little if any research has examined the impact of diverse information systems environments. Several frameworks based on Wang and Strongs original work have been developed in an effort to cater for new and evolving information systems. The expansion of frameworks across a large number of domains presents problems with respect to framework choice, appropriateness, validity and eventually too many diverse frameworks to allow for practical application in diverse information systems environment. In order to overcome these problems this research proposes the construction of a method that allows for the application of Wang and Strongs information quality framework in diverse information systems environment. This method clearly indicates that diverse environments accessing the same information present different levels of information quality; in particular some dimensions have more significance in non traditional environments and as a consequence allowances must be made for this. This in turn impacts on the traditional total weighted sum measurement of information quality dimensions. We recommend that assignment of weightings for individual dimensions in diverse environments. Our method contributes to information quality as field of research by allowing for refinement of the application of information quality frameworks in diverse information systems environments and provides the basis fore consolidation of information quality frameworks.