Decision Support System

A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized, human or a combination of both.

DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, and personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present includes:

  • inventories of information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),
  • comparative sales figures between one period and the next,
  • projected revenue figures based on product sales assumptions.

Read more about Decision Support System:  History, Taxonomies, Components, Classification, Applications, Benefits

Famous quotes containing the words decision, support and/or system:

    A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
    Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)

    Surely, ‘tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him so ... so here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the character ... of generosity and virtue.
    Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)

    The pace of science forces the pace of technique. Theoretical physics forces atomic energy on us; the successful production of the fission bomb forces upon us the manufacture of the hydrogen bomb. We do not choose our problems, we do not choose our products; we are pushed, we are forced—by what? By a system which has no purpose and goal transcending it, and which makes man its appendix.
    Erich Fromm (1900–1980)