Information Quality Management

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Information quality management is an information technology (IT) management discipline encompassing elements of quality management, information management and knowledge management. [1] It further encompasses the COBIT information criteria of efficiency, effectiveness, confidentiality, integrity, availability, compliance and reliability. The idea is for companies to have the risks of using a program diminished to protect private and sensitive information.

Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service is consistent. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it determines quality. It is written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Thus, quality can be defined as fitness for intended use or, in other words, how well the product performs its intended function

Information management (IM) concerns a cycle of organizational activity: the acquisition of information from one or more sources, the custodianship and the distribution of that information to those who need it, and its ultimate disposition through archiving or deletion.

Knowledge management (KM) is the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organisation. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.

It is held by some that the separation of software engineering, infrastructure management, and information security management leads to difficulties and failures. These failures occur especially when communication is needed between these two sectors

Software engineering is the application of engineering to the development of software in a systematic method.

Information security management (ISM) describes controls that an organization needs to implement to ensure that it is sensibly protecting the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of assets from threats and vulnerabilities. By extension, ISM includes information risk management, a process which involves the assessment of the risks an organization must deal with in the management and protection of assets, as well as the dissemination of the risks to all appropriate stakeholders. This of course requires proper asset identification and valuation steps, including evaluating the value of confidentiality, integrity, availability, and replacement of assets. As part of information security management, an organization may implement an information security management system and other best practices found in the ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27002, and ISO/IEC 27035 standards on information security.

Thus, leading edge companies are starting to integrate these information quality management disciplines along with the discipline of information risk management. These two disciplines ensure that software engineering frameworks of the future have established information security controls in place before the project commences.

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References

  1. Ge, Mouzhi, and Markus Helfert. "A review of information quality research." (2007).

Further reading