Improving the Quality of Corporate Household Data: Current Practices and Research Directions

Abstract

Corporate household data not only refers to the strict hierarchical structure about and within the corporation, but also the variety of inter-organizational relationships. It is becoming increasingly important for many purposes ranging from CRM and ERP applications, to risk management, supply chain management, and marketing. We propose conceptual definitions for corporate household, corporate household knowledge, and corporate household knowledge processor. After describing research challenges and conceptual definitions, we summarize current practices and approaches. We then present a two-part plan: (1) continue our qualitative research to describe the various different sources, views, and purposes for corporate household data, including the rules used in each case; (2) apply the context interchange theory to represent the corporate household data and underlying knowledge and enable the context mediation technology to correctly understand and reason about both the context of the sources and the context of the user's query about corporate household data.