The ability to transform data into insights to help manage a company is the domain of corporate business intelligence, which consists of the processes, applications, and practices that support executive decision making. With such knowledge at a premium, chief information officers have moved to center stage. By connecting the right parties across their companies, CIOs are making their role—helping organizations to mediate between business requirements and IT capabilities—more critical than ever.

It’s a challenging mission because for all the data flowing through companies, executives often struggle to find the information they need to make sound decisions. Potentially valuable content is frequently trapped in organizational silos, lost in transit from one system to another, bypassed by inadequately tuned data collection systems, or presented in user-unfriendly formats. Although wired with layers of information-gathering technology, organizations still find it difficult to deliver the right data to the right people.

At the heart of these difficulties are inadequate executive information systems, supposedly designed to help top management easily access pertinent internal and external data for managing a company. Our research suggests that a set of common problems plagues these systems, which have existed for some time. Some forward-looking companies have therefore given CIOs a mandate to redesign them and to restore their importance in corporate decision making.