Data quality in collaborative commerce

Collaborative commerce (c-commerce) is an information technology-enabled process for organisations to share data and resources, adjust their activities, and augment each other's capabilities in order to reap mutual benefits. Data quality has long been an important issue that may compromise the potential of information systems. Assuring data quality is more critical in c-commerce than it is in intra-organisational information systems because of the need for extensive sharing and exchange of data among business partners. In order to better understand and then measure and manage data quality in c-commerce, this study points out that inter-organisational data integration, inter-organisational data synchronisation, and inter-organisational data transparency are the major data quality issues in c-commerce, and proposes the different levels of data integration, data synchronisation, and data transparency. This study also discusses how to use two global information networks in industry, Global Data Synchronization Network and the EPCglobal Network, to address the data quality issues in c-commerce.