A Meta-Model for Information Governance - Facilitating transparency of the decision-making process in R&D Portfolio Management

In R&D Portfolio Management transparency and information are considered to play an essential role in the improvement of decision-making. However, organizations often fail due to a lack of clear roles and responsibilities as well as missing mandates to carry out information quality. Additionally, organizations do not even know which information is critical and how it is used throughout their business processes. Information Governance is an approach to better govern the use and steer the quality of business critical information within a process and is becoming an increasingly important success factor. However, the concept of Information Governance is complex and not well-understood and the adequate implementation of Information Governance in an organization can therefore be difficult. While there are best practice frameworks for implementing Information Governance, a conceptual scientific approach for designing an organization-specific model is lacking and a common basis for Information Governance has not yet been framed. This research identifies, defines and structures the main concepts to be considered and presents a meta-model for Information Governance. The meta-model understands information as an organizational asset and supports organizations to build their individual Information Governance model based on the concepts and relationships defined in the meta-model. A proof of concept through model instantiation for R&D Portfolio Management is given to demonstrate the feasibility and purpose of the meta-model. The proposed meta-model soundly supports organizational efforts to facilitate process transparency and improve decision-making in R&D Portfolio Management by illustrating what aspects of Information Governance are relevant.