Conceptualizing Data in Multinational Enterprises: Model Design and Application

Collaboration and coordination within multinational enterprises need unambiguous semantics of data across business units, legal contexts, cultures etc. Therefore data management has to provide enterprise-wide data ownership, an unambiguous distinction between "global" and "local" data, business-driven data quality specifications, and data consistency across multiple applications. Data architecture design aims at addressing these challenges. Particularly multinational enterprises, however, encounter difficulties in identifying, describing and designing the complex set of data architectural dimensions. The paper responds to the research question of what concepts need to be involved to support comprehensive data architecture design in multinational enterprises. It develops a conceptual model, which covers all requirements for defining, governing, using, and storing data. The conceptual model is applied in a case study conducted at a multinational corporation. Well-grounded in the existing body of knowledge, the paper contributes by identifying, describing, and aggregating a set of concepts enabling multinational enterprises to meet business requirements.