Despite the widespread adoption of Executive Information Systems (EIS) and their increasing importance in organizations, the process of their development is not well understood. The mainstream EIS literature tends to report success stories of EIS in the organizations studied and attribute this to a pre-planned rational process of origin and design of EIS. In this paper, a case study of the EIS development process in a manufacturing company is used to critique this rational view and to illustrate the applicability of an alternative perspective based on an organizational behavioural model. This paper suggests that greater recognition of the social nature of the process of IS development is necessary to understand how systems projects may be better managed.
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