A Conceptual Data Quality Framework for Collaborative Commerce

The past few years have witnessed the emergence of collaborative commerce (c-commerce), which is an informationtechnology-enabled process for organizations to share data and resources, to adjust their activities, and to augment each other’s capabilities in order to reap mutual benefit. Data quality has long been a problem that compromises the potential of information systems, and assuring the data quality is more critical in c-commerce because of the intensive sharing of data among business partners. We argue that the conventional data quality concept, which was mainly targeted on a single organization, does not sufficiently address the issue of data quality in c-commerce, and needs to be extended. This study raises the issue of data quality in the context of c-commerce and proposes a conceptual data quality framework for ccommerce, which includes data integrity, data integration, data synchronization, data transparency, and data dynamics as five categories. Additionally, the study discusses two data quality assurance initiatives in industry: global data synchronization network and EPCglobal Network. The study concludes with a discussion of the business implications of data quality and direction of future research. The study contributes to the knowledge of data quality in c-commerce, and more importantly, the proposed data quality framework may provide a useful guideline to c-commerce practice.