Because companies operate in an increasingly dynamic environment, corporate
management has become more complex in recent years [1]. Due to their overall
responsibility, C-level managers, hereafter referred to as executives, are particularly
affected by this situation. Executive information systems (EIS) help such
senior managers to perform their jobs more productively and efficiently by serving
as their central, hands-on, day-to-day source of information [2, 3].
Far-reaching environmental upheavals often prompt the question of whether
organizations are still equipped to meet the new challenges they face. We took the
2008/2009 economic crises as our reference point for re-examining an issue over
the last five decades [4–8]: the role of executives and the information support they
receive. Points of criticism have been information overload, inadequate technology,
complex IT handling, and a lack of evolution planning [ 9, 10].
The present moment seems favorable for redesigning EIS. First, digital natives
increasingly populate organizations management along with digital immigrants,
who learned to engage with IS and developed into EIS users over the years [11].
These new-generation managers more naturally accept EIS, but also have higher
expectations about how these systems should accommodate their user preferences.
Second, technical progress has been made in recent years, so that even senior
managers should be able to operate EIS themselves. Thus, EIS use factors are
gaining importance as EIS design broadens its scope beyond deployment to
include managers’ use and impact perspectives as well [12].
This article examines how corporate management is evolving, and what issues a
redesigned EIS should address. Assuming that the increasingly dynamic environment
represents the ‘‘new normal,’’ we arrive at four prescriptive statements for
an EIS architecture that is more business-driven than the state of the art. In doing
so, we address the following research questions:
• Taking the 2008/2009 economic crisis as a reference point, what changes are
taking place in corporate management from a European viewpoint?
• What are the implications of these changes for EIS design and what concrete
impact could redesigned EIS architectures have in terms of, e.g., decisionmaking
cycle times or the quality of corporate management decisions?
After setting the foundations of the research questions and searching for
promising methods and components for EIS architecture, we describe our survey.
The initial survey data comes from 1999; since then, we have conducted two
additional surveys. The first took place between November 2007 and March 2008,
before the onset of the economic crisis in mid-2008. The second survey was
performed between November 2009 and March 2010, after the downturn. Based on
the findings, we discuss implications for redesigned EIS, followed by a conclusion
and outlook.