A conceptual data quality framework for collaborative commerce

The past few years have witnessed the emergence of collaborative commerce (c-commerce), which is an information-technology-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 c-commerce, 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.