Efficient operations producing high quality results are a goal in many industrial and service domains. This is considered as precondition to strengthen the competitive position of an enterprise on a global market. Shortcomings due to information overload, like not to have accurate information readily available for the task at hand or for making a decision, causes unnecessary efficiency and quality problems and need to be solved. On this general level, the industrial demand is to solve existing information flow problems in the enterprise (avoid costs caused by wrong or missing information; more efficient information management aligned to the business needs). During the earlier infoFLOW project, a number of such industrial cases were analysed and solutions were proposed. These individual cases also confirmed the industrial demand for “taking a shortcut in learning curve”, i.e. to learn from other enterprises with similar information flow problems how to avoid or solve them, which is supported by organisational knowledge about how to design information supply in a reusable way. This demand is particularly observed in collaborative processes with many external actors, where conventional process improvement and standardization of operations cannot be applied.

infoFLOW-2 is a continuation of the previous project infoFLOW. The core problems addressed in the continuation are: The concept of information demand patterns and the actual patterns developed require a more thorough validation What effects does the use of information demand patterns have in organisational improvement processes? How to evaluate, qualify and quantify the effects of pattern use? A systematic way for elicitation of information demand patterns has to be developed, i.e. from pattern candidate to well-documented pattern description. The approach of information demand patterns needs to be put on a wider base, i.e. a larger community working on this subject has to be established helping in developing, validating and applying patterns

Partner:cBusiness AB, Proton Group, SYSteam, CIL, Jönköping School of Engineering, Fraunhofer ISST

Duration: 1.11.2010 - 31.12.2011