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

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.

A Systematic Review of Business and Information Technology Alignment

“…Realignment can be defined as a method of managing the rethinking and redesign of business goals and objectives to achieve a dramatic improvement in organizational performance, product quality, speed in the delivery of organizational services, and improvement in IT support [Marx et al 2011]. Avison at al.…”

Self-Service Management Support Systems: Findings from a New-Generation Manager Perspective

“…New-generation managers criticize MSS for their lack in accommodating their multifaceted work (functional requirements) and their individual attitude toward IS (non-functional requirements, [7,10,11]). They consist of both digital natives who grew up with IS as well as digital immigrants who learned to engage with IS as adults and developed into IS users over time [12].…”

“…Combining the validity of SEMs and the relevance for practice of less rigorous list approaches, our research to derive requirements for MSS design follows a threestep approach [11,21,38] (see Table 1). …”

“…The Corporate Navigator framework and its first instantiation by Marx et al [11] is based on the St.Gallen Business Engineering framework [57] and consists of four design layers comprising strategic positioning, conceptual design, business/IT alignment, and IT components to react flexibly to changing business requirements.…”

Complications with Complexity in Requirements

“…Requirements are important in the management information systems field, having been cited with respect to issues including agile software development [Cao et al 2010], generic design goals and requirements [Schmidt-Rauch and Schwabe 2011], executive information systems [Marx et al 2013], and IT-business alignment [Choi et al 2013;Ullah and Lai 2014]. Requirements are not the only place to look for improvements in systems development, and complexity is not the only challenge to be faced in requirements.…”