Introduction
In the past thirty years, the business environment changed continuously in many aspects. In the 1980s, new management practices such as Total Quality Management (TQM) emerged. In the 1990s, new market forces like deregulations, globalisation, mergers, enterprise integration and e-business generated new challenges to businesses. In the 1990s and beyond, the evolution of information and communication technology (ICT) impacted worldwide businesses in supporting new ways of working, re-engineering and enhancing enterprise information systems (EIS) (Loucopoulos, P., 2008). To respond to the changes of business environment, companies change to better satisfy customer requirements, address increasingly tough competition, improve internal processes and modify the range of products and services they offer (Jacobson, I. et al., 1995). At the same time, the integration and evolution of information technology impacted the organisations significantly. Information systems (IS) which is a formal description of an abstract model of a modelled domain (Loucopoulos, P., 2008) not only serve traditional business needs such as co-ordination of production and enhancements of services offered but also play a more important strategic support role to enable automation, monitoring, analysis and co-ordination of whole business functioning (Barrios, J. et al., 2004). In another word, to survive and grow up in today’s ever changing surroundings, businesses have to respond to changes as quickly as they can. As a result, the capability of handling IS for the purpose of organisations’ adapting and decision making demands is vital for business to achieve success in dynamic environment and severe competitions.
One domain function of IS is supporting organisations in the term of ra ...