Requirements on information technology for product lifecycle management

Good decision-making is founded on good information. Information technology supporting product lifecycle management ought to provide a high degree of information cohesion and traceability – knowledge of the interrelations among data, and basis for belief. Providing cohesion and traceability is made difficult by differences in viewpoint and ontology employed by the various disciplines and organisations involved in the product lifecycle. This paper describes an analysis of cohesion and traceability into its constituents properties. The paper suggests that process-aware integration schema can improve the cohesion and traceability among product data.