An empirical study of EIS satisfaction: some preliminary findings

Current EISs failed to systematically scan, process and provide meaningful information to senior managers engaged in strategic decision making, which has been seen the main cause leading to EIS dissatisfaction. The design of current EISs concentrates a great deal on technical issues, i.e. ease of use, graphics capability, data access and drill-down features, this may not be attractive enough to get executives’ hands on the EISs. Rather, through EISs "to improve strategic information available to the top management team" appears essential to increase executives' satisfaction. The EISs hence should be able to scan both external and internal information of relevance to executives (Heley and Watson, 1996; Vandenbosch and Huff, 1997; Frolick, et al. 1997), in particular, should be able to cater for soft, non-quantitative and highly aggregated information (Watson, et al. 1996). This can be implemented by embedding the EISs with information scanning facilities to scan both factual and soft information from the external environment, and tools for filtering and refining the received information. In addition, the "Information Support" role needs to be created as opposed to traditional IT support, to enhance senior executives', as well as an organisation's information scanning and processing capability.