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Six principles for redesigning executive information systems—findings of a survey and evaluation of a prototype

Published: 05 January 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Information Systems (IS) meant to help senior managers are known as Executive Information Systems (EIS). Despite a five-decade tradition of such IS, many executives still complain that they bear little relevance to managing a company and, even more, fail to accommodate their working style. The increasing acceptance of IS among today's executives and technological advances of the Internet era make the present moment favorable for redesigning EIS. Following the design science paradigm in IS research, this article provides six principles for such a redesign. To do so, we survey executives regarding their requirements and the IS they currently use. We then derive principles for a redesign to fill the gaps. They address diverse areas: a comprehensive information model, functions to better analyze and process information, easy-to-use IS handling, a more flexible IS architecture and data model, a proper information management, and fast prototype implementation. Finally a field test demonstrates and evaluates the utility of our proposal by means of a prototype.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
    ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems  Volume 2, Issue 4
    December 2011
    141 pages
    ISSN:2158-656X
    EISSN:2158-6578
    DOI:10.1145/2070710
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 05 January 2012
    Accepted: 01 November 2011
    Revised: 01 August 2011
    Received: 01 December 2010
    Published in TMIS Volume 2, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Corporate business intelligence
    2. design principles
    3. design requirements
    4. executive information system (EIS)
    5. working style

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