An Executive Information System (EIS) as a management information system is generally designed to be emphasized with graphical display and very easy to use and appealing interfaces as this is assumed to be used for supporting and facilitating the information and decision making needs of senior executives. 

 

 

EIS offer strong ad-hoc querying, analysing, reporting and drill-down capabilities without having to worry about complexities of the algorithm involved in the system.  The senior executives can have easy access to both internal and external information relevant to meeting the strategic goals of the organization. 

 

Many IT professionals consider the Executive Information System (EIS) as a specialized form of a Decision Support System (DSS) with very strong emphasis on the capabilities involving reporting and drill down data mining. 

 

In fact, most of the data consumers like the senior position holder in a company get generate reports from many layers of data involvement and the reports automatically highlight trends and patterns in the operations within the business enterprise and its relation to the business trends of the industry where the business is operating.

 

An Executive Information System (EIS) works closely with data warehouses in monitoring business performance as well as identifying problems and strong points of the company. 

 

Today’s Business Intelligence, with its high end sub areas including analytics, reporting and digital dashboards, could be considered by many to be the evolved form of the Executive Information System.

 

In the past, huge mainframe computers were running the executive information systems so that the enterprise data can be unified and utilized for analyzing the sales performance or market research statistics for decision makers such as financial officers, marketing directors, and chief executive officers who were then not very well versed with computers. 

 

But today’s executive information systems are no longer confined to mainframes as these types of computers are slowly phased out due to its bulk and the increasing powers of smaller computers. 

 

Many executive information systems are now being run on personal computers and laptops that high ranking company officials and CEOs can bring with then anywhere as meet the demands of a data driven company as well as industry. 

 

In fact, executive information systems are now well integrated into large data warehouses with many computers internetworking each other and constantly aggregating data for informative reporting.

 

An Executive Information System is a typical software system composed of hardware, software, and telecommunications network. The hardware may be any computer capable of high speed processing but since this is a rather large system dealing with high volume of data, the hardware should also consider very large random access memory capacity and high storage capacity. 

 

The software component literally controls the flow and logic of the whole system. The software takes care of all the algorithms which translate business rules and data models into digital representations for the hardware to understand. 

 

The software may both have text base and graphics base. It also contains the database which manages all data involves and closely collaborates with the algorithms for processing the data. These algorithms may specify how to do routine and special statistical, financial, and other quantitative analysis. 

 

 

The telecommunications network takes care of the cables and other media which will be used in data transmission. It also takes care of the traffic within the network as manages the system communications with outside networks.