TOPic: DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: AN OVERVIEW AND ITS ROLE IN BUSINESS

Introduction
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.
Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present are: * 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.
Making decisions concerning complex systems (e.g., the management of organizational operations, industrial processes, or investment portfolios; the command and control of military units; or the control of nuclear power plants) often strains our cognitive capabilities. Even though individual interactions among a system's variables may be well understood, predicting how the system will react to an external manipulation such as a policy decision is often difficult. What will be, for example, the effect of introducing the third shift on a factory floor? One might expect that this will increase the plant's output by roughly 50 percent. Factors such as additional wages, machine weardown, maintenance breaks, raw material usage, supply logistics, and future demand need also be considered; however, as they all will impact the total financial outcome of this decision. Many variables are involved in complex and often subtle interdependencies and predicting the total outcome may be daunting.
There is a substantial amount of empirical evidence that human intuitive judgment and decision making can be far from optimal, and it deteriorates even