Back in the ‘90s if you wanted a quick and easy way to know how your company was performing, there were two things that were required. First, your company needed to have an EIS or executive information system in place. Second, in most cases you needed to be in senior management to access it. Obviously, this severely limited the number of users and, ultimately, the benefits to be obtained by enabling people to get more in tune with company performance. In the end, this didn’t really matter that much since EIS systems rarely lived up to their hype anyway. The reason I am including this little bit of history is that I think it is helpful to have a solid understanding of the evolution of these systems in order to effectively deploy more successful information systems in the future.

EIS was all the rage in the mid to late '90s, promising easy-to-use graphical displays of key information for technology-fearing executives. I was at Hyperion Software (formerly IMRS) at the time, and we had an EIS product that was quite successful from a sales perspective. However, about 80% of the software sold ended up as shelfware. I find this to be a true measure of whether a technology promises more than it can deliver. Our other products were “boring” but essential number-crunching financial applications. EIS was flashy and sexy and actually helped pull some of the less exciting products into the deal. So what was wrong with EIS?

For starters, the whole concept of information just for executives was flawed. What about the rest of us, don't we need information too? In addition, I believe that the real problems were in the implementation details. All of the data for the EIS was staged and static. You can't keep your finger on the pulse of your business if the data doesn't reflect current conditions because it hasn't been refreshed in awhile. Of course, all the issues of data quality that we are better at addressing today negatively impacted the validity and accuracy of the displayed information. Also, navigation (drill-down, drill-across) was limited to a pre-programmed path of static reports set up by IT as they tried to anticipate how the executives would want to move through the system (never an easy task). That brings us to the real killer: determination of the key information that would populate the EIS. This was usually done by IT with minimal input from the executives. In most cases, this translated into taking a handful of existing reports that had been around for decades and shoveling them into the system. This rarely reflected what the executives should really be focused on. It should be noted though that even with the latest and greatest technologies being deployed today, this problem still exists at some organizations.

EIS Today

So where is EIS today? Essentially it has been reborn as the performance dashboard, a key component of business performance management (BPM). Learning from the mistakes of the past, leading systems are dynamic, interactive and real-time when they need to be. In the best implementations, there are a series of interconnected cascading dashboards so everyone in the company can see the information that is relevant to them. As mentioned, there is still the risk of populating these dashboards with the wrong information; but if companies follow established best practices, they will start at the top with executive input on current strategy and establish a cross-functional team to flesh out the details.

In most companies, it is also understood that while the dashboard sits at the top of the information pyramid, it cannot sit there alone. Without master data management (MDM), planning and budgeting, consolidation, governance, risk, compliance and several other systems and initiatives, the dashboard’s potential value is greatly diminished. The good news for business performance management is that, unlike EIS, most vendors and many companies (usually with the help of experts deploying best practices) are getting it right. Thanks to them, BPM is bucking the normal trend of three-letter acronym initiatives and actually living up to its hype.

Recent articles by Craig Schiff

• Business Performance Management in 2010, Part 2
• Business Performance Management in 2010, Part 1
• The Emerging Leaders in Performance Management, Part 2
• The Emerging Leaders in Business Performance Management, Part 1