EIS Approach: Operational Dimension of the Pharmaceutical Information Systems

Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) supporting business processes are to be characterized by integrity, flexibility, and interoperability. Nevertheless, the urbanization approach, on which we rely to implement business and technical infrastructures levels of any EIS, has to deal with "three fit" problems: "vertical fit" problems - concerning the business infrastructure; "horizontal fit" problems and "transversal fit" problems - concerning the technical infrastructure. To overcome "three fit" problems it is necessary to: reduce the gap between these two infrastructures; facilitate communication and coordination between components in each of the infrastructures. We propose our approach to deal with "three fit" problems following an operational dimension which includes and exploits organizational and decision-making ones. The cooperative dimension ensures the consistency and the interaction between these different dimensions. Particularly, we present the characteristics of the operational dimension, which is the dynamo of all other dimensions. We apply our contributions to define this dimension of the Pharmaceutical Information Systems (PIS).