EXECUTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEM (EIS)
EIS was
developed in the mid-1980s with a primary goal of enhancing the strategic
planning and control processes of executives through the provision of quality,
timely, accurate and accessible information (O’Brien 1991).
Provided a broad understanding of
company information by summarizing large quantities of data and allowed the
user to drill down to different levels of data to gain insight into the detail
of information.
One dilemma facing the high-quality
information requirements of EIS is the fact that data is often input using
unskilled and untrained operatives, which may lead to gross errors and
misleading analyses.
Careful consideration must be taken
to avoid dangers of ‘garbage in, garbage out’ syndrome and potential risk of
making the wrong decisions.
Research on the effective
implementation of EIS has found number of factors that linked with continuous
improvement that can increase the EIS -à
- Need
for a committed executive sponsor to drive project and provide feedback on the
product quality and expectation
- Need
for a pro-active operating sponsor, to act as market researcher with the
executives, confidence builder, product designer and operational line manager
- The
bringing together of business knowledge and IT skills through framework
- Coordinating
systems and processes lower in the organization with EIS to ensure alignment of
effort
- Visually attractive graphics
WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (WMS)
- One
of the ideal tools in business process re-engineering
- Part
of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and consider as the back-office
integration processes in organization.
- An
important function of WMS is the modelling of workflows. WMS can be seen as
repositories of an organization’s procedures and process.
- They
are predominantly suited to the efficient processing of a large number of
‘cases’ within a small number of predefined process.
- With
a separate workflow defined each case more likely to occur in future
developments of WMS
- Example
cases; customer orders, insurance claims, university application and tax
returns. However, each cases has a unique identity and a limited finite
lifetime.
- Task
in a WMS are logical units of work such as writing reports and assessing
candidates, and can be manual, semi-automatic or automatic.
- The
combination of a task and a case is termed a work item and the application of a
task on a case is seen as an activity. Besides that, there are number of ways
that a case can go through a process and this determines the nature and order
of the tasks to be performed.
- This routing of a case may be à
-
Sequential
-
Parallel
-
Selective
There are traditional and formal analysis of processes is use of ‘PETRI
NETS’ – enables processes to be described graphically and is composed of places
and transition.
This to ensure precise definitions of processes and prevent ambiguities.
Circle – places indicate states within a
process
Rectangle – transition may denote different
activities between states
*Places and transitions often linked
together using arcs shown by the arrows
Besides that, to
develop standards with the multitude of WMS, the Workflow Management Coalition
(WFMC) was set up to define terminology and provide standards for exchange of
data between different systems. The WFCM has produced a workflow reference
model as a general description of architecture in WMS.
In addition, there are
different aspects of WMS:
1. Workflow
enactment service
2. Process
definition tools
3. Workflow
client application
4. Invoked
application
5. Administration
and monitoring tool
There are 2 methods of developing WMS using
business process re-engineering (BPR) or rapid application development (RAD).
1. BPR – aims to discover the most
efficient and effective business processes without resource to existing
processes.
However, BPR lifestyle is initiated by senior management and
contains 4 phases:
1. Diagnosis
2. Redesign
3.
Reconstruction
4. Operations
2. RAD – uses more evolutionary method
for developing WMS and has a strong emphasis on user participation.
The RAD
approach comprises 4 phases
1. Requirements
planning phase
2. User design
phase
3. Construction
phase
4. Delivery
phase
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