Using Mission-Specific MIS Infrastructures

This chapter focuses on something that has unfortunately drawn little attention in the past, but is expected to garner more and more interest in the years to follow, namely mission-specific Management Information Systems and the underlying Management Information System infrastructures. Managerial/organizational information needs and the role of Management Information Systems in business organizations have been studied from one side only: formalizing the functions and defining typologies of operations. This (wrong) approach still dominates the field despite the fact that such type of MIS covers only less than 5 or 10 per cent of the interactions and communications amongst the employees and the management of a commercial business or an organization. This chapter examines two example cases related with the building of a conceptual framework for the study of research ecosystems and the measuring of government innovation within the countries of the European Union.