Affiliations: School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China
Abstract: The Management Information Systems (MISs) have been displaying
considerable diversity during the evolution in the past decades. It comes such
a big demand and challenge to draw an overarching picture of the evolutionary
development of MISs. By systematically investigating the existing
representative literature/research in MISs, especially by analyzing and
modeling the MIS concepts, this paper first identifies the crises and
challenges the traditional MIS has faced. Furthermore, by applying EBD, a
design methodology, the author analyzes how these crises have been addressed,
and as a result, how the classical MIS Pyramid is transformed and developed
into an intelligence-integration framework for the understanding of MISs
evolution, which is able to not only position various information systems, but
also show how these systems are still interrelated in the whole process of the
evolution. The two dimensional framework here for MISs is conceptual model
based, and different from prior frameworks, is able to describe the overall
evolution of management information systems dynamically, rather than just
"partially", or "statically". This framework also provides a model applicable
to the development of MISs and information technologies, thus it is has
meanings not just academia but also practice. The descriptive validity or
consolidation of the framework is demonstrated by applying it to published
MISs' studies. Future trends and challenges of MISs are also discussed based on
the framework in this paper.
Keywords: Management information systems, evolution, framework, Environment Based Design, literature review
