Harmonizing company-wide Information Objects

In today’s companies, particularly multi-national enterprises acting on a global scale, historically grown systems and application landscapes, as well as processes, lead to significant problems when systems (and even employees) need to communicate with each other, i.e. when entities are exchanged across processes and organizational units. What is needed is a common language and, hence, unambiguously and consistently defined entities that represent essential objects of a company’s environment. The paper at hand introduces a method that is intended to enable companies to increase the transparency on and consistency among information objects on a conceptual level. The scope of METIO is not limited to a one-time effort, but rather constitutes an iterative approach for a continuous perpetuation and improvement of a consistent set of information objects. The whole method is designed for application in the context of large-scale companies that, due to their size and international scope, dispose of a certain complexity and inconsistency in regard to their information objects.