Information Integrity Adding Value to Corporate Assets

Abstract

Information Integrity is dependability and trustworthiness of information. Its determinants are accuracy, consistency and reliability of information. With the availability of process data and information on current basis, business organizations are getting recognized to be “open systems”. This makes for business activity emphasizing “information” and modeled as multistage decision process based business IS. Due to ever present external and internal system environmental factors, this business IS is impacted by uncertainty at all stages of decision-making from setting operable business goal to undertaking customized planning & design for generating alternatives for evaluation and final selection of flexible information decision for control implementation for satisfactory service to the recipient (customer-external as well as internal). This results in information errors through the entire supply chain and leads to loss of Information Integrity. If business IS is to originate and process information efficiently and economically, that is if the decision process - that the IS is - is to deliver information decision as output so that recipient achieves maximum information use for the decision objective at hand (and this IS must do if business were to be competitive), then it is fundamental that the information, which constitutes the bottleneck resource and, hence, a product, is with integrity. In other words, Information Integrity is the critical factor in controlling the quantum and economy of originating and processing information for use, i.e., for adding value to the corporate assets through strategic and competitive advantage in complex and changing business environment