Developing a framework to facilitate the assessment of asset management information quality in facilities management operations

Information quality issues have taken an increased importance in academia and industry and have many causes attributed to it. Poor information quality presents significant costs to an organisation, financially and non-financially. However, the issue of information quality has not been explored in depth in the field of facilities management. Thus, within the context of facilities management, this has led to failures in asset management programs undertaken by facilities management organisations and present a significant challenge in the decision-making process by facility managers. Achieving improved asset information quality in facility management operations is thus of immense importance to stakeholders in facilities management. To this end, various methods and frameworks have been developed to assess and improve information quality, but these have very limited scope and not applicable in facilities management organisation undertaking asset management. To this end, this research aims to evaluate the quality of information and determine what factors impact information quality of asset management programs in the facilities management domain. The research adopts an exploratory mixed-method methodology, which allows data to be collected and analysed using qualitative and quantitative techniques to provide greater insight of the phenomenon in facility management operations. The qualitative approach uses thematic analysis to determine what factors affect the quality of information from the information, organisation, and people domain respectively. The results from this analysis show that factors affecting information quality of asset management programs is multidimensional. In addition, 71 information quality attributes has been identified from the qualitative analysis. In the quantitative phase, principal component analysis (PCA) with direct oblimin rotation, ANOVA, and measure of central tendency (MCT) techniques were adopted to identify the specific dimensions of information quality in asset management, the effect of the structure of the organisation on information quality, and the prevalence of information quality issue in asset management respectively. The results from the analysis identified 12 information quality dimensions which was grouped into seven (7) categories. Also a high prevalence of information quality issue experienced by facilities management professionals was observed with a mean value of 7.90 and median value of 8.00 and standard deviation of 1.467 which was normally distributed. Further analysis indicated that the hierarchical structure of the organisation had an effect on information quality which was statistically significant. Based on the result of the analysis, a framework, using a perceptual map premised on multi-dimensional scale (MDS) technique, has been developed that seeks to assess the quality of information of asset management programs in facilities management.