IQM-CMM: Information Quality Management Capability Maturity Model

1 Introduction (p. 1)

"The beginning is the most important part of the work." -Plato, The Republic

This chapter lays out the foundation for the rest of the book by presenting a brief overview of the research background, the research problem, the research questions, the justifications for the research, and the aims of the research. The research methodology is briefly explained and delimitations of scope and key assumptions are discussed.

The chapter finally summarises the research findings and outlines the rest of the book. 1.1 Background to the Research Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been evolving at a very fast rate in the relatively recent times. Such a rapid progress has made the production, collection, and storage of information very easy and inexpensive.

As a result, contemporary organisations are dealing with more information than ever before in history (Lyman & Varian 2003, McCue 2006, Nunno & Meehan 2007, Bell, Logan & Friedman 2008). However, these technological advances have among others led to a decrease in the quality of the available information. Information accuracy, completeness, timeliness, relevancy, and so on, have proven to be notoriously difficult to assess and manage.

Furthermore, even though quality assurance methodologies have played a crucial part in the software engineering and manufacturing industries for decades (Paulk et al. 1993, Mahoney & Thor 1994, CMMI 2002, ISO 2005b), Information Quality Management (IQM) is only practiced in a minority of contemporary organisations (TDWI 2006).

This is despite the fact that many such organisations clearly depend on quality information for every-day business operations, and even their very survival in today's competitive business environments (Redman 1998). Quality management has been an integral component of software engineering and manufacturing industries for decades (Paulk et al. 1993, Mahoney & Thor 1994, CMMI 2002, ISO 2005b), and it has been described as being fundamental to organisational success and growth (Feigenbaum 1986, Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Berry 1990).

The Total Quality Management (TQM) movement started with the development of the statistical control charts by Walter Shewhart in 1925 (Shewhart 1925). Since then, many researchers, whom we now call "quality gurus", including, Juran (1974), Crosby (1979), Deming (1982), and Ishikawa (1986) have contributed a great deal to quality management theories.

The Total Data Quality Management (TDQM) program at MIT has been instrumental in the adaptation of TQM theories to the field of information quality management (Wang & Strong 1996, Strong, Lee & Wang 1997b, Wang 1998) by drawing an analogy between the manufacture of tangible products and Information Products (IPs).

Crosby (1979) was the first to propose the idea of quality management maturity. His ideas have since been adopted by IBM (Radice et al. 1985) and SEI (Paulk et al. 1993, CMMI 2002) to software engineering, and by several other researchers (Chambless & Parker 1998, English 1999, Caballero, Gómez & Piattini 2004, Ryu, Park & Park 2006, Aiken et al. 2007) to information management and information quality management. This research further adapts Crosby's ideas to the development of an Information Quality Management Capability Maturity Model - IQM-CMM.

IQM-CMM is developed inductively, as opposed to some deductively proposed models found in the literature, and, as such, it is grounded in empirical data gathered from a wide range of information quality experts and practitioners. As a result, the model does not represent a limited view of one researcher, but it aggregates a variety of different views.

1.2 Research Problem and Research Questions

It has been argued that to ask the right question is to be well on the way to finding the right answer (Brown et al. 1997), and that the formulation of a research problem is the first and most important step of the research process (Kumar 1999).