Decision Support Systems

A decision support system is an interactive human–computer decision-making system that supports decision makers rather than replaces them, utilizing data and models. It solves unstructured and semi-structured problems with a focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency in decision processes. In the early 1970s, scholars in this field began to recognize the important roles that decision support systems (DSS) play in supporting managers in their semi-structured or unstructured decision-making activities. Over the past five decades, DSS has made progress toward becoming a solid academic field. Nevertheless, since the mid-1990s, the inability of DSS to fully satisfy a wide range of information needs of practitioners provided an impetus for a new breed of DSS, business intelligence systems (BIS). The academic discipline of DSS has undergone numerous changes in technological environments including the adoption of data warehouses. Until the late 1990s, most textbooks referred to “decision support systems.” Nowadays, many of them have replaced “decision support systems” with “business intelligence.” While DSS/BIS began in academia and were quickly adopted in business, in recent years these tools have moved into government and the academic field of public administration. In addition, modern political campaigns, especially at the national level, are based on data analytics and the use of big data analytics. The first section of this article reviews the development of DSS as an academic discipline. The second section discusses BIS and their components (the data warehousing environment and the analytical environment). The final section introduces two emerging topics in DSS/BIS: big data analytics and cloud computing analytics. Before the era of big data, most data collected by business organizations could easily be managed by traditional relational database management systems with a serial processing system. Social networks, e-business networks, Internet of Things (IoT), and many other wireless sensor networks are generating huge volumes of data every day. The challenge of big data has demanded a new business intelligence infrastructure with new tools (Hadoop cluster, the data warehousing environment, and the business analytical environment).