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Executive Information Systems Use in Organisational Contexts: An Exploratory Study

Executive Information Systems Use in Organisational Contexts: An Exploratory Study
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Author(s): George Ditsa (University of Wollongong, Australia)
Copyright: 2002
Pages: 10
Source title: Issues & Trends of Information Technology Management in Contemporary Organizations
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-930708-39-6.ch048
ISBN13: 9781930708396
EISBN13: 9781466641358

Abstract

Like any other type of information system, Executive Information Systems (EIS) appeared on the computing scene in the late 1970s with the promise of making businesses gain competitive advantage by their use to enhance managerial decision-making. At that time, these systems were mainly known as Executive Support Systems (ESS). As a departure from the mainstream information systems, EIS are designed and built primarily to support managerial functions of top-level managers in organisations. With advances in technologies such data warehousing, data mining, OLAP, ROLAP, MOLAP, Internet, Intranet, Extranet and the Web, indications are that more and more organisations are turning to implement EIS in one form or another. Currently they go by other names such as Enterprise-wide Information Systems, Enterprise Business Intelligence Systems, Everybody’s Information System, and Balanced Scorecard or simply Scorecard. The recent hype about Knowledge Management has even made EIS more attractive to organisations. Despite the attractiveness of these systems, there are equally reports of their high failure rates. Some of these failures are due to the non-use of the systems. This paper reports on a research in progress on the use of Executive Information Systems (EIS) in organisational contexts. The primary focus of the research is to investigate factors that explain users’ behaviour towards using EIS in organisational settings. It is also aimed at identifying the relative importance of these factors that determine the use of EIS. Preliminary results suggest there is very high perceived usefulness of EIS in organisations. The results also suggest social factors are much considered by users in using EIS. They also suggest users consider satisfaction with information from EIS, support for the EIS system and the EIS system itself a little more over EIS development plan in using EIS. The preliminary results also suggest users consider management processes associated with EIS system more than EIS development processes and the organisational environment in using EIS.

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