Development of assurance techniques for information quality on technical advice

Abstract

The Maritime Division (MD) of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), undertakes the development of platform models to support the provision of technical advice to Royal Australian Navy (RAN) acquisition projects. This requires the synthesis of different types and sources of information into the advice given. The information can include pure scientific data through to technical data from industry and may even include rules of thumb. This variation in the data source and types has led DSTO to seek methods to assess the quality of the information used in the advice they provide. In this paper, a method is presented for the selection of dimensions, their categorisation and development of a rating scale for information quality. The research does not consider database data quality issues, as these are outside the scope of the problem. A scale is developed from weighted values of 15 quality dimensions considered important for this work. The quality dimension weightings were developed using a pair-wise comparison.