Bedarfsanalyse fachlicher Metadaten - Universität St.Gallen

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Abstract
Abstract
In respect of the increasing competition, it becomes more and more essential for companies
to generate and share information internally. Today, in the course of advancements
in information technology (IT), an information overflow is overservable, which
makes it harder for the individual to identify the relevant information. Therefore, it
becomes more and more important to supply purposeful and high-quality information.
At this point, business metadata as “data about data” increases the data quality from a
user perspective in terms of transparency.
Despite its increasing relevance to practitioners, the implementation of business metadata
in companies still lacks behind its predicted utility because the required support
from the business side is missing. Although these challenges are well known and correspond
to the experiences in other fields, concrete solutions in literature remain rare.
This constitutes the problem statement for the dissertation at hand. In a design science
approach, generic models are developed, which constitute recommendations on the
results of a demand analysis. Since this dissertation is designed in a cumulative fashion,
each of the herein presented articles generally pass through a design science
cycle (esp. design and evaluation).
The developed models complement an activity based view of demand analysis, which
is primarily discussed in literature. This activity based view solely describes the procedure
for identifying, validating, and specifying business need. Therefore, an overview
over the eleven application domains for business metadata, a framework of qualitative
and quantitative benefit dimensions, as well as an implementation independent
functional map for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) business metadata solutions are
presented. In addition to this, this dissertation introduces four user types and a model
for end-user device selection in order to account for the preferences of users, which
can be crucial for the success of rolling out business metadata.
Keywords: business intelligence, business metadata, demand analysis