Large data volumes, widely distributed data sources, and multiple stakeholders characterize typical e-business settings. Mobile and wireless technologies have further increased data volumes, further distributed the data sources, while permitting access to data anywhere, anytime. Such environments empower and necessitate decision-makers to act/react quicker to all decision-tasks including mission-critical ones. Decision-support in such environments demands efficient data quality management. This paper presents a framework for managing data quality in such environments using the information product approach. It includes a modeling technique to explicitly represent the manufacture of an information product, quality dimensions and methods to compute data quality of the product at any stage in the manufacture, and a set of capabilities to comprehensively manage data quality and implement total data quality management. The paper also posits the notion of a virtual business environment to support dynamic decision-making and describes the role of the data quality framework in this environment.

In this research we have presented the concept of a Virtual Business Environment (VBE) that supports dynamic decision-making and examined the implications for data quality in such environments. We have motivated the need for such environments using the operations and patient flows in a hospital. We have further described the critical need for high quality information and the need to track and measure quality in such environments where real-time data is collected and used. An important issue here is the need to seamlessly integrate real-time data and data collected by other traditional means. We have proposed an architecture that addresses this requirement. Visualization is a technique that plays an important role in managing information quality. We have proposed the notion of information product maps (IPMAPs) as a modeling method for representing the creation, processing, and consumption of information products in these environments. Quality dimensions incorporated into the IPMAP permit the information manager to examine the quality of the product under different scenarios. This examination can be visually performed using a VBE for managing information quality. 1 This research is sponsored by BUILDE. We would like to thank Shakoor Jilani, Theresa Meyer and Max Bessanov for their research work on this project. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information Quality

E-Business (E-Commerce) infrastructure requires organizations and their IT systems to be flexible and adaptive to changes in the dynamic business environment. Component-based development is seen to be the solution for rapidly creating modifiable and maintainable e-Business systems. Organizations have attempted to strategically align their IT and organizational goals in developing mission-critical e-Business systems. In this research we propose architecture for designing such systems based on the notion of business capabilities and technology capabilities. This tiered architecture provides a formal framework for understanding the cohesive relationships between IT and business capabilities in organizations. It allows for rapid what-if analysis for managing IT investments and offers the flexibility needed to manage changes in designing and developing information systems for e-Business. The architecture supports the packaging of existing legacy systems and links them to the e-Business systems to create outward facing mission-critical information systems demanded by the e-Business infrastructure.