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The EIS... alive and ticking?

The Executive Information System is not a new term to most businessmen. The concept has been around for many years, even though the definition is still fuzzy. From the start, the EIS has claimed to be the system that will present all that data as information the executive can make his decisions from. It's graphical presentations with alarms were supposed to take the guesswork out of data interpretation. All the executive need do is turn on the machine and it will tell you either "all is well" or "look here, there's a problem". That concept was well before its time. The first EIS's were developed on mainframes after huge learning curves on complicated software. Expensive, difficult to develop and difficult to maintain, they didn't deliver. Many executives are soured to the claims.

Enter the micro, relational databases, powerful servers, easy to use software tools. The time is truly ripe for quickly developed, easy to use, easy to maintain, and relatively inexpensive applications. But expectations still need to be managed. Consider the following guidelines for today's EIS:

All is not rosy... some cautions: