Barbara Dinter

Traditional decision support approaches (data warehousing or business intelligence) are limited because they focus on certain analysis techniques, user groups, or usage scenarios. This reduces their potential as integrated foundation for enterprise-wide decision support. The concept of information logistics (IL) is proposed to overcome these shortcomings. IL involves planning, implementing, and controlling cross-unit data flows and storing and providing decision-relevant data. It covers strategy, process organisation and IS implementation in an integrated manner, and focuses on enterprise-wide information delivery. In this paper, the concept of IL is presented. An action research project documents the formulation, implementation, and roll-out process of an IL framework in a large company over several years. The applicability, feasibility, and utility of the IL concept is demonstrated.

Maturity level modeling has been a well-established and important stream of IS research. Maturity models have played a significant role in guiding organizational process improvements in many areas. It is therefore surprising that maturity model design and development methodologies have not yet been scrutinized from cross-cultural and international perspectives. In this research, we have prescribed a rigorous approach to identifying, validating and calibrating maturity models constructs for cross-cultural application. We have employed this new methodology in the context of widely accepted business intelligence maturity model that has been initially developed in Germany. Our current effort involves following our proposed methodology to target and calibrate those nationally specific model components that need modification and calibration for application in the US. We report on our progress, and we discuss implications in terms of both findings relevant to culture in IS research, maturity model methodology research and BI maturity model research.

Although managerial issues of data warehousing and business intelligence received considerable attention in recent years, the strategy process has not often been investigated. This is particularly true for the recently proposed, more holistic concept of information logistics. This paper discusses the state of the art of information logistics (IL) strategy and proposes a framework of analysis which combines supply chain oriented decomposition with functional decomposition. As a foundation for proposed strategy components, current IL strategy practices are analyzed by means of a survey. The findings show that IL strategy seems to be linked to company size, governance type (business line vs. business process), and IL organization. Supply chain oriented IL strategy components (sourcing, delivery, portfolio) gain less attention than IL solution development and maintenance strategy components.