Hi

I have been doing some literature
research on Executive Information Systems (EIS) and have noticed a
significant drop in the amount of literature being produced over the
last 8
to 10 years. I know from personal
experience that companies still use EIS in one form or another, so I
found
it quite interesting to see so few recent publications. Does anyone
have
any theories as to why this might be the case? I don't think it is an
out-
of-date idea (although you might disagree?) but maybe EIS are used
differently now to 10 years ago and so need redefining in literature.
Does
anyone have an opinion or any experience with EIS?

Regards

Matthew Nicholls

"Mat Nicholls" <lufc4 (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

I think I recall responding to this same question (from you?) in some other
forum, but I'll answer again in case I'm wrong.

The term "Executive Information Systems" is a dated one, while the concept
is not. The umbrella term of "Business Intelligence" (not my favorite
term -- could be an oxymoron) is used for all types of "reporting" against
data. Other terms to look for are:

BI = Business Intelligence
DSS = Decision Support (that is often the name of courses in higher ed,
including one I'm teaching)
Decision Analysis
Data Warehousing & Data Marts
OLAP = Online Analytical Processing
Cubes or Data Cubes
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Dashboards (I think these last two terms arose during the EIS years)

The term "EIS" didn't cut it. "Executive" was too limited a term and seemed
to promise more than it could deliver, I suspect.

Yes. I have worked with products that called themselves EIS, including
Forest & Trees from Platinum, bought by CA (at which point it died, I
suspect since that seems to be CA's MO). I have also worked with OLAP tools
and creating cubes for analysis, as well as virtual cubes. Almost
everything in this category today fits into the "BI" or Business
Intelligence category, including ETL (extract-transform-load) tools, such as
Data Stage from Ascential.

I don't see anything on the horizon to suggest that the term "EIS" is going
to have any rebirth. Cheers. --dawn

Hi everyone


I would like to say thank you to everyone who offered their opinion on
my
research. I would like to quantify my results to enable me to produce
some statistics on
current opinion regarding the definition and validity of Executive
Information Systems (EIS) today. I have produced a questionnaire to
help me do this, and would be very grateful if you could
spare a couple of minutes to fill it in. You will find it at the
following address:


http://www-student.cs.york.ac.uk/~mjn104/quest.doc


There are only 17 questions and
they are all tick-boxes so it should be quick and easy to complete. I
will
also make the results available to the group for anyone who is
interested.


Many thanks in advance.


Matthew