Abstract
The increasingly dynamic and global business environment has placed tremendous onus on senior executives to make strategic decisions within shorter time spans. To function effectively in such environments, executives need to engage in greater communication, collaboration, information scanning and extraction activities that are relevant to the organization. Executive information systems have recently received heightened attention for their role as important support systems to spot potential problems and reveal opportunities to realize mission-critical objectives. This paper investigates the role of Internet related technologies as an architectural basis to develop future executive information systems. By harnessing the power and the features of the Internet, technology-based solutions can be developed to overcome some of the major drawbacks in the current implementations of executive information systems. The key characteristics of the Internet which include the existence of vast information bases, intra- and inter-organizational communications support, global scope, intuitive interfaces, and intelligent agents are explored as architectural components of the next generational executive information systems.