Towards Improving Structure and Content of Information Demand Patterns

Work presented in this paper originates from the field of information logistics and aims at the reduction of information overload. Among the approaches for reducing information overload, the concept of information demand patterns (IDP) was developed for capturing organizational knowledge on how to improve information flow in enterprises. The paper investigates how the structure of IDPs is perceived by potential users and which enhancements of the structure could be made for improving content and quality of IDPs. For this purpose, an investigation including two steps is performed. The first step involves students in a university course who apply the IDP structure for developing IDP candidate descriptions. The intention is to explore whether the IDP structure reached a level of maturity to transfer it to non-experts in the IDP field. The second step evaluates the IDP developed by the students with respect to the quality of the different parts of the IDP structure. The conclusion of the investigation is that the IDP structure in general is applicable and useful, but consistency between the different IDP parts needs to be improved by providing aids and guidelines.