IT Architecture and Information Quality in Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Environments

Organizations are currently investing more in information technology to store and process a vast amount of information. Generally, this information does not comply with any standard, which hinders the decision-making process. The cause of the difficulties can be attributed to Information Quality (IQ), which has technical characteristics related to the architecture used in Data Warehouse (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) environments. On the basis of the relevant literature in IQ, DW, and BI, a research model was created to identify the relations between components of DW/BI architecture and IQ dimensions. This research model was applied in a real case study (Big Financial Company in Brazil). This case study involved semi-structured interviews with managers and analysts. This chapter attempts to provide a better understanding of the relations between IT architecture and IQ in DW and BI environments. The authors hope to motivate the discussion around the development of IQ-oriented architectures for BI and the relationship between these concepts.