Use Cases for Business Metadata - A Viewpoint-Based Approach to Structuring and Prioritizing Business Needs

Business metadata plays a crucial role in increasing data quality of information systems (IS) especially in terms of data believability, ease of understanding, and accessibility. Despite its importance business metadata is primarily discussed from a technical perspective, while its business value is scarcely addressed. Therefore, this article aims to contribute to the further development of existing design approaches by explicitly accounting for the use cases of business metadata. In the course of this article a conceptual framework of use cases is developed, which can be applied in identifying the respective informational requirements a business metadata system needs to satisfy. The framework is structured along the stages of data processing: data consumption, data staging, and data production. A banking case is presented that demonstrates how this conceptual framework has successfully been applied in practice.