C2 information quality: An enterprise systems perspective

With the advent of the Information Age and the continued development of information and communications technologies (ICT), individuals and organizations have had to manage a transition from a world characterized by the paucity of information to one marked by a deluge of information. The information-related quality metrics that have been developed and used measure both absolute characteristics and “fitness for use.” The absolute measures relate to inherent aspects of a particular piece of data or information while the fitness-for-use measures generally consider the context of a single information consumer. Command and Control (C2) in the 21st century relies increasingly on decentralized and distributed networks. As a result, data and information quality needs to be considered from a systems or networked-enterprise perspective. This paper provides an example of enterprise information quality metrics and employs these to explore two networked-enterprise information quality-related hypotheses. The first of these posits a relationship between measures of enterprise information quality and the effectiveness of an enterprise. The second argues that the values of selected enterprise information quality measures determine the most appropriate organizational approach option. Experimental results are presented that support these two hypotheses.