4.1.3 Smart Information Architectures – Systems Engineering Information within an Enterprise

In the past decades the world has been changing in almost every aspect. Systems development is facing ever rapidly changing and increasingly global environments in markets, competition, technology, regulatory and societal systems. The resulting increase in complexity within system development can be only handled by mastering the information describing the system (product development data)1. In most companies product development data is captured in an extremely heterogenous environment, that is various proprietary tools along the development processes request, manage, and provide product data. The heterogenity is causing user perceived information losses, in terms of redundant or inconsistent, incomplete, reduced, or mismatched information. Four properties (user orientation, integrity, adaptability, intelligence) of smart information architecture to overcome these shortcomings are introduced. A structured approach to model and analyze the existing information landscape of an enterprise, to develop a reference architecture incorporating the proposed properties and migrate the existing one, is developed and discussed. An application of the model within an automotive environment and the subsequent implementation of the results within a PDM-system provide valuable insights as well as validate the basic applicability of the model. The results presented are based on various research projects with industry the authors have been involved in and in particular a Ph.D. thesis in preparation [Schulz, 2001].