Decision support system
Decision support system is an information system which helps an organization or a business in decision making activities.
Decison support system serves mid and top level management, since decision support system are mostly required for unstructured or semi-structured decision problems. Decision support system can be computerised, human-powered or both. Decsion Support Systems are also needed for decision problems that are rapidly changing.
While academics argue that Decision Support systems are merely a tool to support decision making processes, the users of decision support system say that Decision Support systems support the organisational process of the business. Some authors have extended the meaning of Decision Support System to include any system which has decision-making feature while others may include decision-making software component.
Sprague in 1980, tried to define Decision Support System with few points. These are as follows:
- Decision Support systems are aimed at semi-structured or unstructured decision problem which mid and top level management face.
- Decision Support System use models and analytical tools to present the information whose data are retrieved by tradational data-access and retrieval functions.
- Decision support system focuses on features that are targeted towards easy adaptability by non-computer-profecient people. The user interface are usually in interactive mode.
- Decision support system has an heavy emphasis on flexibility and adaptability so that it could keep up with the changing environment and decision making approach of the user.
Decsion support System are ultimately knowledge-based system. A properly made decision support system is an interactive software based system which combines raw data, business models, personal knowledge and documents to give out a meaningful information to identify and solve decision based problems.
Typical examples of information what a decision support system might give are as follows:
- Information of inventories of assets.(data warehouses, relational data, cubes)
- Comparision between sales figures of this month and the next.
- Projected revenue figures based on assumptions of sales figures.
Taxonomies of decision support systems
Haettenschwiler, differentiates decision support system into three types. Namely:
- Passive Decision Support System
- Active Decision Support System
- Co-operative Decision Support System
Another Taxonomy of Decision Support System was made by D.Power. According to him, the Decision support system can be differentiated on the principle of mode of assistance. The different type of Decision support system accoding to this taxonomy are as follows:
- Communication Driven Decision Support System
- Data Driven Decision Support System
- Document Driven Decision Support System
- Knowledge Driven Decision Support System
- Model Driven Decision Support System
- Communication Driven Decision SupportSystem