Decision Support Systems in SAD System Analysis and Design

There are many approaches to decision-making. There are also a wide range of fields in which decisions are made. If we look at the approaches and fields concerned with decisions making, it is quite difficult to define decision support system in a plain way. Decision Support System can take many different forms. Generally, DSS can be defined as a computerized system that helps you in make decisions. Prior to understanding what DDS is you should understand first what is decision? Decision is a choice between alternatives based on estimates of the values of those alternatives.

Supporting a decision means helping people working alone or in a group gather intelligence, generate alternatives and make choices. Supporting the choice making process involves supporting the estimation, the evaluation and/or the comparison of alternatives. In practice, references to DSS are usually references to computer applications that perform such a supporting role.

According to Keen, the concept of decision support has evolved from two main areas of research: the theoretical studies of organizational decision making done at the Carnegie Institute of Technology during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the technical work on interactive computer systems, mainly carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. It is considered that the concept of DSS became an area of research of its own in the middle of the 1970s, before gaining in intensity during the 1980s. In the middle and late 1980s, executive information systems (EIS), group decision support systems (GDSS), and organizational decision support systems (ODSS) evolved from the single user and model-oriented DSS.

It is clear that DSS belong to an environment with multidisciplinary foundations, including (but not exclusively) database research, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, simulation methods, software engineering, and telecommunications.