We have been talking for years about management information systems (MIS), but what a terribly outmoded expression that is, and how restrictive it is for software developers. We are in an age where a digital database drives every aspect of business, from the Look-up Tables in a colour management system to the list of elements that make up a PDF file. Like it or not, printers are in the data business and we need to rethink how we manage business information, and what we need in order to do that.

The MIS nomenclature, like that of its sibling Enterprise Resource Systems (ERP), hasn't changed in years, but the business has. Modern printers need business systems that harness digital data from all sectors of the business to inform, improve and refine data-driven processes. This is why we are seeing new alliances, such as the one between Chili Publishing and Tharstern, which links Chili Publish to the E4Print Pro ecommerce platform.

A number of traditional MIS companies have started to understand that the industry needs a more joined up approach to business management, from the large such as EFI to the comparatively small, such as Optimus. EFI leads the field largely on the back of its many acquisitions of business systems providers, the most recent of which is Alphagraph. Alphagraph has around 6,000 customers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and develops both MIS and ERP technologies. EFI's interest in the company is purely for its customers who will be candidates for the full EFI suite. This includes Monarch for complex and complete workflow automation publication, book, direct mail, transactional and commercial print production. Radius is for customers who want to automate production and data management for labels, folding cartons and flexible packaging. Pace, the most widely used of EFI's offerings, is for mid-market digital, offset, hybrid, wide-format and speciality printing operations, and PrintSmith is geared for on-demand, copy shop and small commercial operations. In addition to all this, EFI's Digital StoreFront for web-to-print and e-commerce extends data management out to the internet.

Like its competitors EFI has developed (via acquisitions) systems specific for print-related applications that integrate digital processes. However, printing businesses need technologies that unify all parts of the workflow to improve administrative and customer service functions. This is why we can expect to see increased production awareness, for instance metadata about jobs that might influence job costings. Optimus is considering increasing its colour management functionality for this reason. And GMG's Production Server uses XML to keep all subsystems within its purview aware of what jobs are where and their production status. Caldera, a RIP developer specialising in wide-format applications, has added a rudimentary carbon calculator to its suite of RIP modules. This isn't really MIS because it's part of a RIP system, but it illustrates how developers are coming up with tools and ideas that reach beyond their traditional areas of expertise to help business owners better exploit the digital data they produce as a by-product of other processes.

So what do company owners expect from their business systems? Obviously they need tools for defining, specifying, and producing jobs. This includes access to the resources required to do this, with cost comparisons, and analysis on a job-by-job basis on how actual costs compare with estimated costs. They want to measure and understand the performance of people and kit over time and to have their KPIs (key performance indicators) available in bite-sized chunks for different sites, departments, operators or machines. They also want to be able to see the larger trends in their business, and to be able to knit together the significance of those trends beyond cash-flow management. The hope is that it will be easier to spot new business opportunities.

The term MIS suggests some arcane and dark set of processes, belonging more to the dust of the last century than to the bright shiny new digital age. Those companies succeeding in the printing industry are the ones who recognise that investment into business information gathering, analysis and exploitation is as important as the heavy iron investments that still get most of the attention.