A manager's guide to executive support systems

Managers must be ready to work with those designing their executive support systems; otherwise, the systems will be cosily failures. O ver the years, computers and information systems have had little effect on how senior executives perform their jobs. With only a few notable exceptions, senior executives seldom have been hands-on computer users. They request needed information from staff or lower management personnel. Now this approach to securing information is changing. In each of the following examples, taken from current practice, the executive obtains the information directly from a PC or terminal on his desk. • Paul Frech, president of Lockheed-Georgia, monitors employee contributions to companysponsored programs (United Way, blood drives) as a surrogate measure of emplo}ee morale (Houdeshel and Watson 1987). • C. Robert Kidder, CEO of Duracell, found that productivity problems were due to salespeople in Germany wasting time calling on small stores and took corrective action (Main 1989). • Ted Athanassiades, executive vice president for pensions at Metropolitan Life, can access the records of 3,200 pension clients to find out instantly who handles an account (Main 1989). • William Smithburg, CEO at Quaker Oats, accesses the Dow Jones Service and The Source (external databases) to support monitoring of the external environment (Wallis 1989). These examples are not isolated incidents. Senior executives are using computers in similar ways in a growing number of firms. The systems that these executives use are referred to as executive information systems (EIS) or executive support systems (ESS). An EIS is a computerized system that provides executives with easy access to internal and external information relevant to their critical success factors. While a definition is useful, a richer understanding is provided by describing these systems' characteristics. Most executive information systems: • are tailored to executives' information needs; • extract, filter, compress, and track critical data; • provide on-line status access, trend analysis, exception reporting, and "drill-down"; • access and integrate a broad range of internal and external data; • are user-friendly, and require minimal or no training to use; • are used directly by executives without the assistance of intermediaries; • present graphical, tabular, and/or textual information. The EIS and ESS terms sometimes are used interchangeably. In general, references to ESS usually mean systems with a broader set of capabilities than EIS, including: • support for electronic communications (email, voice mail, computer conferencing, and word processing); • data analysis capabilities (spreadsheets, query languages, and decision support systems); • organizing tools (electronic calendars, automated rolodex, and tickler files). These additional capabilities typically are made available as options on a system's main menu or by the ability to "hot key" the workstation into a PC mode of operation. The systems described in this article are referred to as executive support systems because they typically provide capabilities beyond those associated with executive information systems.