Executive Information System implementation in organisations in South Africa and Spain: A comparative analysis Udo Richard Averweg a, * , Jose ´ L. Rolda ´n b a eThekwini Municipality and University of KwaZulu-Natal, Information Services, P O Box 828, Durban 4000, South Africa b University of Seville, Department of Business Administration and Marketing, Av. Ramo ´n y Cajal, 1, 41018 Seville, Spain Received 17 December 2004; received in revised form 5 June 2005; accepted 5 June 2005 Available online 8 August 2005 Abstract Executive Information Systems (EIS) grew out of the information needs of executives and are designed to serve the needs of users in strategic planning and decision-making. EIS are high risk information technology implementation projects. The authors compare survey studies of EIS implementation in well-established organisations in South Africa and Spain. From a comparative analysis, the authors report eight identified parallelisms and three differences in EIS in these countries and suggest that there is scope and need for continued research in the area of future EIS implementation in these countries. D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Executive Information Systems (EIS); EIS development; Web-based technologies 1. Introduction Executive Information System (EIS) is a computer- based technology designed in response to the specific needs of executives [52] and for making both strategic and tactical decisions [42]. An EIS is used by execu- tives to extract, filter, compress and track critical data [12] and to allow seamless access to complex multi- dimensional models so that they can see their business at a glance [20]. An effective way to evaluate the success of an EIS is to obtain opinions from the executive users [27]. This paper presents the results of detailed interviews on EIS in a sample of well- established organisations in South Africa and Spain in order to identify parallelisms and differences. It con- tributes to the existing knowledge of EIS as no pre- vious investigation of a similar nature has been conducted in these countries. The authors’ work fol- lows the stream fostered by Watson et al. [55] which set a landmark in the study of EIS practices. These researchers cast light on EIS research because previ- ous literature was based mainly on case studies or had an anecdotal character. Starting from this milestone, several other contributions have showed a general view on EIS use in different countries (e.g. South Korea [32], Spain [42], Sweden [47], Turkey [23], 0920-5489/$ - see front matter D 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.csi.2005.06.001 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: averwegu@durban.gov.za (U.R. Averweg), jlroldan@us.es (J.L. Rolda ´n). Computer Standards & Interfaces 28 (2006) 625 – 634 www.elsevier.com/locate/csi