The pervasiveness of mission-critical online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, aided and abetted by relational database management systems, increased the importance of applications but these were still business-process oriented and not focused on management-decision-making processes. So the M was dropped to create IS and later the name was changed to information technology (IT).
During all this time there was a parallel track of activities that worked to use information to aid management decision making. Early attempts were limited to specific domains using limited amounts of data. Operations research/management science focused on algorithms and models, such as economic order sizes for products. Statistics, such as a least squares analysis, were used to do early forecasting and predictive analysis.
Eventually decision support systems arose that were not as algorithmic-focused but rather focused on organizing information in a way that would give insight into a specific decision such as adding plant capacity or ongoing decisions such as working with suppliers to improve their performance. Then executive information systems (EIS) were developed to collect information from several sources to allow senior executives to manage their subordinates better. This was a precursor of data warehousing and managed scorecards, but the process was not easy to accomplish.
Finally, data warehousing solutions that collected information from multiple sources and made it available as one version of the truth evolved. Getting to that point was difficult because of data quality issues as well as disagreements within enterprises over such issues as the basic nature of customers and products. If you have never been there, you cannot appreciate how difficult such an apparently simple task can be! Additionally, getting enterprises to understand how they could exploit all the richness of information has been anything but easy and still has a long ways to go. But now the market has blossomed.
So we are now approaching the era of true MIS although it will never be called that given its archaic roots. Still let's think of MIS for just a minute. First, senior managers can now understand better what is happening in their business as a whole--balanced scorecard anyone?. At the next level down, managers can also understand their own areas of interest better and faster meaning that they can get the information that they need to avoid getting blindsided by their bosses.
