The author reviews the application of information systems to corporate management in a wide variety of businesses, from manufactuaring to distribution, financing, and the service industry from the viewpoints of society, business, management, and information system. The review brings out key points in business, strategic establishment of a competitive edge, improved white-collar productivity, global work-sharing, and the promotion of horizontal cooperation. It then goes on to explore next-generation information development in the expansion of informational space, easier connection to information networks, personalization, and security.

Few reseaches have been made on the practices of Executive Information Systems. In paticular no academic reseaches have appeared in Japan. This paper is a result of an exploratory research on EIS practices in Japanese firms, which was made prior to the building of an EIS normative model. In the research deep interviews were sought in more than ten firms, a descriptive model was created from the field survey, and then hypotheses were derived.

The hypothesis is that executives are ready to use EISs that provide information representing the current status of enterprise activities under the context made by historical data.

The followings are also found as necessary conditions of EIS sustainable use. EIS must have access into detail data. Information sharing among organizational members, and information systems capturing current physical resource status within an organization are required prior to EIS implementation.

There are multiple objectives for the implementation of information network systems, and a number of effects brought by these network systems are expecting. At the decision making on these investments, the cost relating to the investment and the revenue that will be get as a result of investment are easy to estimate.

However, the evaluation of the intangible effects are difficult. This paper proposes the method of the composite evaluation for the value consisting of both quantitative and qualitative.

Many prototyping methodologies have been proposed and used in information systems analysis and development. In this paper the prototype specification of a business system is defined as a combination of the static structure of the business system and a composition of screens, the names of business processes and the business data. We formulate an information systems analysis in which the prototype specification is used for incorporation of information systems into the business system. Based on the formulation, a support system for the information systems analysis is realized into an application software on a 4GL(4th generation language).

The formulation, which is described in the form of a data model, has not only made clear the logical structure of the information systems analysis which make use of prototypes on 4GLs but facilitated the use of products of the analysis as information resource.