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Collaborative management of business metadata
Journal
International Journal of Information Management (IJTM)
ISSN
0268-4012
ISSN-Digital
1873-4707
Type
journal article
Date Issued
2011-08-01
Author(s)
Research Team
CDQ, IWI2
Abstract
Legal provisions, cross-company data exchange and intra-company reporting or planning procedures require comprehensively, timely, unambiguously and understandably specified business objects (e.g. materials, customers, and suppliers). On the one hand, this business metadata has to cover miscellaneous regional peculiarities in order to enable business activities anywhere in the world. On the other hand, data structures need to be standardized throughout the entire company in order to be able to perform global spend analysis, for example. In addition, business objects should adapt to new market conditions or regulatory requirements as quickly and consistently as possible. Centrally organized corporate metadata managers (e.g. within a central IT department) are hardly able to meet all these demands. They should be supported by key users from several business divisions and regions, who contribute expert knowledge. However, despite the advantages regarding high metadata quality on a corporate level, a collaborative metadata management approach of this kind has to ensure low effort for knowledge contributors as in most cases these regional or divisional experts do not benefit from metadata quality themselves. Therefore, the paper at hand identifies requirements to be met by a business metadata repository, which is a tool that can effectively support collaborative management of business metadata. In addition, the paper presents the results of an evaluation of these requirements with business experts from various companies and of scenario tests with a wiki-based prototype at the company Bayer CropScience AG. The evaluation shows two things: First, collaboration is a success factor when it comes to establishing effective business metadata management and integrating metadata with enterprise systems, and second, semantic wikis are well suited to realizing business metadata repositories.
Language
English
Keywords
Corporate Data Quality
Corporate Data Dictionary
HSG Classification
not classified
Refereed
Yes
Publisher
Elsevier
Publisher place
Oxford
Volume
31
Number
4
Start page
366
End page
373
Pages
8
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
213449