A Federated Information System for Quality Management Processes

As the structure of modern organisations changes to networks of decentralised, autonomous units, the demands on information systems alter from simple sources of data to links that connect those units along the workflows and support groups of knowledge workers with timely and task appropriate information. Fulfilling this task depends heavily on the ability to change the information system according to the business process evolution. As our approach to deal with those problems, we present a task oriented, federated information system architecture. We show the impact of this approach in an example where quality management tasks and systems in the industrial product life cycle has been integrated. Starting from the integration of task and information modelling based on a repository architecture, we show how conceptual models support communication and information access in the heterogenous environment by directly relating tasks to the information they need or provide. Furthermore, we propose an information system change process that exploits the described relations between task and information modeling.