Decision Support System

A decision support system (DSS) is an information system that is computer-based and supports business/organizational decision-making activities (1). They serve in many parts of a business, assisting in management as well as operations, and help make decisions. Decision support systems include knowledge-based systems and are designed as interactive software-based systems, which serve to help decision makers collect useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, or business models (1). These help workers identify/solve problems and make decisions, which is greatly important in any business. Decision support systems may access all of a business’s information benefits, such as legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts (2). In addition, they may gather sales and revenue information between one week and the next, helping organizations compare their sales figures and projected revenue figures (2). This helps businesses evaluate how their sales are doing. A decision support system is different from a typical information system or management information system due to the fact that it not only provide users with information, databases, and reports, but also provides users with answers to queries such as decisions through its models (3). Decision-making is extremely important within businesses. Making the right decision in these circumstances is based on the quality of the business’s data and its ability to go through and analyze this data to find the trends in which they can create solutions and strategies for, depending on the information that was collected (4). Organizations should not be without a DSS because they collect, analyze and shape the data that is collected in which they make key decisions and construct strategies from. They help make important decisions and solve problems for businesses and are useful in any organization.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_support_system
(2) http://www.informationbuilders.com/decision-support-systems-dss.html
(3) http://www.bit.vt.edu/academics/dss_index.html
(4) http://www.tech-faq.com/decision-support-system.html