A design theory for data quality tools in data ecosystems: Findings from three industry cases

Abstract

Data ecosystems are a novel inter-organizational form of cooperation. They require at least one data provider and one or more data consumers. Existing research mainly addresses generativity mechanisms in this relationship, such as business models or role models for data ecosystems. However, an essential prerequisite for thriving data ecosystems is high data quality in the shared data. Without sufficient data quality, sharing data might lead to negative business consequences, given that the information drawn from them or services built on them might be incorrect or produce fraudulent results. We tackle this issue precisely since we report on a multi-case study deploying data quality tools in data ecosystem scenarios. From these cases, we derive generalized prescriptive design knowledge as a design theory to make the knowledge available for others designing data quality tools for data sharing. Subsequently, our study contributes to integrating the issue of data quality in data ecosystem research and provides practitioners with actionable guidelines inferred from three real-world cases.