Managers are often disturbed, have a preference for live action and deal with problems as a network of connected problems

Managers are very frequently interrupted by sub-ordinates and others (Mintzberg, 1973). Interruption causes the manager to focus his attention on another issue and therefore when the manager returns to the business intelligence system, whatever the time between, the business intelligence system should always remain in the state which it was in when the manager left it. If the manager was engaged in a planning task, the business intelligence system should refresh itself with the planning window. It should even give managers information about the completion of the sub tasks and provide them with the opportunity to proceed with the task. To decide to give an overview or not can be based on the time the manager was away. If the manager will complete with the task within a few hours, the system can present such an overview. If he succeeds within minutes, such an overview would not be convenient.

Managers have a considerable workload

In their work, managers display some typical characteristics that are significant and relevant in relation to the design of the business intelligence systems they use. Other people, situated in the lower regions of the organization require also business intelligence systems but such systems are different in several ways. The type, the structure and the nature of managerial tasks as well as the working environment can play a significant role in relation to the user interface design of business intelligence solutions.

Production and production capability

Cybernetic or open social systems do have nine features in common (Nadler and Tushman, 1995). These are in the table below and are subdivided into production and production capability aspects.

Variations in the user interface of business intelligence systems

In the first series of blogs, I discuss and explore the ‘world of the manager’and the business intelligence systems they use to make proper decisions and I relate those aspects to (intelligent) user interface design. My primary goal is to determine if and how knowledge-based systems are useful for the partial or complete automatic generation of the user interface of reports and dashboards.