The Development and Applied Strategy of the Executive Information System for Small and Medium Businesses

摘要

The information for an enterprise executive to conducting the business operation is becoming more and more important in facing of the dramatic challenge of global business competition and the proliferation of Internet economy. The managerial level of an enterprise, especially the executive level, should be able to effectively utilize not only the internal information related to the operation of his organization but also the external information of his global competitors as well as other related industries. The information presented to the executive should be further analyzed and well organized so that the decision can be properly made, thus the business may remain survival. In general, the management information system regardless of its content or its completeness is not suitable to support the information needs for the management in the strategic level of an organization. A sort of information system called the executive information system (EIS) has been developed since the beginning of 80s is thought to be able to provide the true information to the executive. Traditionally, the platform to develop the EIS is usually on the mainframe. The developing cost is surprisingly high while the system is also not easy use. These may bring up the obstacle to the organization to adopt the EIS in the countries and areas like Taiwan and Korea where their enterprises are mainly in the type of small and medium business. Recently, as the cost of the information technology is rapidly decreased and the advancement of the information technology such as microcomputers, computer networks and software, the development of an executive information system is caught a lot of attention of enterprise executive in such areas. However, What will the development platform and system model of an EIS be? What are their applied strategies to adopt EIS? We need a referential system architectural model for enterprises to The computer-based information system began to develop since the 1940s. At me beginning, the information systems were used only to substitute the operations of human beings and serve the staff of the operational levels in an organization. Their purposes were to help operational-level staffs and managers to handle and keep track of firm's day-today transactions and activities. The typical example is accounting information system in this era. Starting from 70s, management information systems (MIS) were caught the attentions of management levels in an organization to effectively manage and control their business operations. As the highly development of computer-based information systems (CBIS) and information technologies since 1980s, the different types of information systems were developed to serve different interests, specialties, and levels in an organization. A typical organization is usually divided into strategic, management, and operational levels shown in Figure 1. Systems are built to serve theses different organizational levels (Laudon and Laudon, 2000). In addition to the operational-level systems and management-level systems, other types of systems such as knowledge work systems (KWS) and strategic information systems (SIS) were developed and used to serve the management activities of knowledge levels and strategic levels. Knowledge-level systems are designed to support knowledge and adopt so that the system can be developed more effectively and the developing cost and risk can be reduced. The main objective of this research is to investigate the current state of the EIS development and its applied strategies of the enterprises in Taiwan from two aspects. One is by means of empirical study. The other is to develop a real system. On the empirical study, we survey the enterprises in Taiwan which have had an EIS in use or is being developed. Through the empirical study we want to know the system development platform, the system architecture, tools and methodologies used to implement EIS, the difficulties encountered during the system deve