Executive Information System - Essay Example

EXECUTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM. Introduction With the ever changing business landscape and increasing globalization, senior company executives are faced with an uphill task of making proper business decision, these decisions ought to be instant and it is with this urgency that it has forced most senior level executives in deploying systems that could easily retrieve and make proper analysis on this particular information that is very critical towards an organizations success. With the increasing need for proper business information, new systems that were primarily designed to handle the task of supporting the senior level executives with urgent & critical information started emerging and they were eventually branded as the “Executive Information System.” An executive information system (EIS) could be defined as any piece of software that has been designed to meet specific needs of business executives within an organization. This software provides a means by which any information can be accessed, created and even analyzed by the executives themselves within the organization via personal computers, local area networks, hand held digital devices, intranets and any other technology that has the capability of connecting to an organizations main database system. EIS has the capability of directly aiding and supporting major business decision. A properly designed EIS should foster strategic planning, it should focus on the external environment, it should be user friendly and it should be easy to customize so that it can easily meet the needs of each individual executives (Jeretta & Darryl 2005). Although in some quarters it is known as the Executive Support System (ESS) this is mainly due to the fact that it supports executives in their daily tasks of decision making, it may also include aspects such as personal productivity, co-ordination components and internal communication technologies on the other hand, (Anil Kumar & Prashant Palvia,2001) when a system has a capability to extract data from its worldwide operations so that they may access & evaluate competition from the international perspective, then such a system is referred to as the global executive information system. A typical EIS should be bundled with powerful analytical tools including features such as; User friendliness, capabilities for data retrieval and its security, depicting an organizational health via online indicators, functions for decision support with the ability to perform adhoc queries & what if analysis, advanced features for data analysis, report generation capabilities, analysis tools for structuring & analyzing data and the ability to access various data sources (Ion Lungu & Adela Bara, 2007). The advantages of an EIS may include; user friendliness, summarizes timely information, filters data and offers efficiency for the decision makers while its impediments could be described as limited functionality due to its design, information overload, high implementation cost, organizational data insecurity and system dependent. Since most modern organizations are implementing EIS within their global operations and also the long term benefits are very beneficial not mentioning the competitive advantage that will accrue by getting timely information in an accurate manner it is wiser for an organization to disregard all the drawbacks and implement an EIS for its own benefit. EIS Support to the Organization Management. A properly designed EIS should provide support to the organizations management; it might be used in downsizing, it can be used to adapt an organization to the ever changing market conditions or even making contributions to a quality management program. However, the most important activity for an EIS should be the ability to aid in strategic management process so that organizations objectives may be accomplished conclusively. An EIS does not set objectives but rather monitor how they are being met (Singh et al, 2002). An EIS supports environmental scanning, this external information is very critical for the senior executives in determining the organizations future, they need to know the current news, stock market & industry data. It can also be used in strategy formulation, strategies within an organization are developed by matching the strength and weakness of an organization in comparison to the threats by which it is facing, here an EIS system could provide both the financial and non-financial information that could be easily be used to formulate an organizations future strategy. It could also be used in strategy implementation, once strategies are formulated they definitely have to be implemented, line managers are the ones usually charged with the task of implementation, here the project plans may be involved together with the information concerning budgeting, scheduling & the personnel involved in various tasks. Software applications that support the budgetary process may be included for the financial officers, this will aid them in their day to day decision making, a human resource application may be integrated so that the HR officers may mine data in the personnel database on the basis of either their name, job title, experience, qualifications, department and skills in order to get the most suitable candidate for a particular job (Singh et al, 2002). Finally, EIS can be used in formalization & institutionalization for measurements and the entire control process. A properly designed strategic control has the potential of improving the probability that an organization strategies are going to be implemented regardless of the chaotic & unpredictability of the dynamic nature of an organizations environmental factors. EIS Implementation Success. Measuring an EIS implementation success is always complex and difficult, one formulae is to conduct a cost benefit analysis, is the cost of implementing the system commensurate with the likely benefits. The success might also be compared to the attainment of an organizations goal. However, in some quarters it has been argued that the real success of an EIS lies with the acceptance for the system by the end users, using the system itself, the generated impact of the system towards a users performance, end user’s satisfaction and the impact of the EIS on an individual’s performance. In acceptance, it is more of a proclivity because a senior company executive might choose not at all to use the system whereas the lower level operations support personnel have very limited choices. System usage is a key barometer in measuring an EIS success and measuring acceptance of the system and its usage have to be considered concurrently since a system can be easily accepted but difficult to use. A system may be evaluated by measuring its impact on the end users performance & satisfaction, the effectiveness obtained from the decisions arising from the system usage in comparison to the decision that were likely to be made when the system was absent should be noted and analyzed. User satisfaction is also a very important barometer, whenever an end user perceives the EIS to be providing valuable information not available anywhere, then everybody involved in the development and implementation of the system can reluctantly claim that the system has been successful (Singh et al, 2002). Current Research Directions. Back in the early 1980s when EIS first emerged, they only supported executive’s decisions on an internal environment, however, as globalization approached, there was need for system that would support information from an organizations entire worldwide operations at the touch of a button. This was made possible with the advanced computer networks and sophisticated software’s, today senior executives not only need the global information but they also need it anytime, anywhere and this has been made possible with the advent of the World Wide Web and handheld digital devices such as the palmtops, blackberries and the smart phones. However most of the changes have occurred as a result of a revolution rather than evolution and this has been necessitated by (Prof.Dr. Kees Van Hee et al): Integrating commercial and non-profit making organizations in order to take advantages of economies of scale. Outsourcing business processes to service providers. Usage of Information Technology in improving business process operations. Choosing partners for the production processes within complex and advanced supply chains and integrating those processes within the chain itself. Using real time processing to access information in order to make operational decisions. Some of the phases of strategic management Planning are better supported by the system than the others, this is likely to change due to technological advancements being witnessed on a daily basis. For instance, today the internet browsers have evolved as the user interface of choice in most of the EIS, with the browsers it is easier to perform environmental scanning. Data warehouses are now very common and they are acting as a very valuable information source for the systems, they support an organization strategy formulation by instantly mining data from multiple sources and presenting it to an organizations management for analysis. Today there is a growing importance of the enterprise information systems within organizations particularly in the e-business contexts, there is emergence of the electronic markets and a service oriented architecture is being considered a modern trend which calls for flexibility, adaptiveness, interoperability, extensibility and dependability. Business Process Management: One of the main functions of EIS is to support business processes. Here there is much focus on development of models to support architectures and automated support. During the process enactment most of the organizations are found searching market places and the sub processes are usually integrated with the existing processes. Other research topics are the process mining to discover data organization. Architecture & Development: Due to the complexity of intra-organizational informational system, the architecture should be model driven. Existing systems should always be integrated rather than be developed from scratch, this requires an outstanding technical insight. One of the problems cited has been integrating heterogeneous components. Service orientation architecture aims at re-using & integrating the existing systems rather than developing them from scratch. Maintenance: Most of the systems have a very long life span, there is a very high chance that the system has to be modified somewhere along the journey and so there are a likely hood of legacy parts, this is mainly because there might be new user requirements or change in the underlying platforms. Methods at which parts of a system are to be replaced are constantly being looked upon and different techniques have been cited and a notable one is the mining on the execution of the application system (Prof.Dr. Kees Van Hee et al). Conclusion EIS should improve on the quality of management within organizations using modern technology which are suitable for the extraction, transformation, processing and presenting the mined data in order to be interpreted as strategic decision. An EIS system should have the capability of allowing executives to view the data in different perspectives, they should be able to drill down, navigate through within different levels of the organization and eventually discover certain factors that are critical in business process and anticipate and forecast changes that may affect the organization internally or externally. References. 1. Kees Van Hee et al. Next Generation Enterprise Information System.Netherlands institute for Research on ICT. Retrieved on 11th November 2009. From http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:gEfUf1ovQisJ:nirict.3tu.nl/sra/eis.pdf+EIS+current+research&hl=en&gl=ke&sig=AFQjCNF-8PBNnkmCIE0P_vrZi27r9aPQVg 2. Ion Lungu & Adela Bara. (2007) Executive Informational System, multidimensional model. Informatica Economica. Retrieved on 12th November 2009. From http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:qd1rG3cLhEgJ:revistaie.ase.ro/content/43/10-lungu.pdf+Executive+Information+Systems+2007&hl=en&gl=ke&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgQpGDfwvBsW8gAOx8XIcPAjRze7rKqLeL7uMu16ZYrIhcOkcE3Yxp7SbBCBZsSlxoHV4zS7mEir3JHYqu0WZpJs8oXCJ4eX-hKqGh2iSN8jNYqClpN_srnx58NDUsIdK9JYNH2&sig=AFQjCNHbKymcMZiOo_5Oxyq72uHIGyYQhQ 3. Jeretta Horn Nord, G Daryl Nord. Executive Information Systems: A Study and Comparative Analysis. Elsevier. 4. Anil Kumar, Prashant Palvia. Key Data Management Issues in a global executive information System. 5. Sanjay K Singh, Hugh J Watson, Richard T Watson. (2002) EIS Support for The Strategic Management Process. Read More