Toward a Taxonomy of the DATA Resource in the Networked Industry

The Internet of Things, the continuing globalization of logistics networks, decreasing product life cycles and increasing numbers of product variants are examples of current developments that pose, in general, new requirements both on networked industries and on data in logistical systems. Volume, heterogeneity and importance of data for businesses are growing. In order to be able to manage data under these complexity constraints, networked industries need a current, comprehensive and consistent understanding of the data architecture, i.e. of the key data entities, their relationships, their sources of origin, trustworthiness, frequency of occurrence, quality and ownership. As current approaches for data architecture management in particular and data resource management in general fall short in providing support for this endeavor, the paper at hand proposes a morphology of the data resource in networked industries. The morphology is the result of a taxonomic analysis aiming at providing structure to complex data environments. The paper uses four case studies to identify and describe the dimensions of the morphology and its characteristics. Furthermore, the paper develops the baseline of a method for guiding the application of the morphology.