Distributed intelligent executive information systems

Abstract

Executive information systems (EIS) have been successfully implemented in many organizations. Of all the various EIS commercial products, only one (Executive Edge) presents limited artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. Yet, the ability to include various problem solving agents for collaboratively information processing, filtering and presentation, is highly desirable. It is possible that the successful EIS systems of the future will be built around AI components (expert systems, learning mechanisms and so on..), so that more efficient and effective information processing for executives can be achieved. Since much of executive processing involves complicated problem domains, a single's AI agent effort may be insufficient when the information is broad in scope and complicated in nature. For such situations we propose in this paper a framework called distributed intelligent executive information system (DIEIS). This framework illustrates how multiple resources (consisting of knowledge learning, reasoning, filtering and presentation) can be combined for information processing in an EIS environment. For example, a particular piece of information may be refined and presented based on past experiences and current practices in a particular problem domain with the help of both an expert system and neural computing. The DIEIS framework allows multiple agents to work collaboratively to help complex information processing.