What is DSS (Decision Support System)? Decision Support Systems

 Q4. What is DSS (Decision Support System)? Decision Support Systems

Ans. A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based information system that support 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..

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, domuments, personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present are: (i) inventories of information assets (including legancy and relational data sources), cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),

(1) comparative sales figures between one period and the next, (iii) projected revenue figures based on product sales assumptions. As with the definition, there is no universally-accepted taxonomy of DSS either. Different authors propose different classifications. Using the relationship with the user as the criterion, Haettenschwiler diffrentiates,

(A) Passive DSS 

(b) Active DSS

(c) Cooperative DSS

A passive DSS is a system that aids the process of decision making, but that cannot bring out explicit decision suggestions or solutions.

An active DSS can bring out such decisioin suggestions or solutions. 

A cooperative DSS allows the decision maker (or its advisor) to modify, complete, or refine the decision suggestion provided by the system, before sending them back to the system for validation.

Another taxonomy for DSS has been created by Daniel Power. Using the mode of assistance as the eriterion, Power differentiates communication-driven DSS, data-driven DSS, document-driven DSS, knowledge-driven DSS, and model-driven DSS.

 1. A Communication-driven DSS supports more than one person working on a shared task; examples include integrated tools like Microsoft's NetMeeting or Groove

2. A data-driven DSS or data-oriented DSS emphasizeds access to and manipulation of a time series of internal company data and, sometimes, external data.

 3. A document-driven DSS manages, retieves, and manipulates unstructured information in a variety of electronic formats.

4. A knowledge-driven DSS provides specialized problem-solving expertise stored as facts, rules, procedures, or in similar structures.

5. A model-driven DSS emphasized access to and manipulation of a statistical, financial, optimization, or simulation model. Model-driven DSS use data and parameters provided by users to assists decision makers in analyzing a situation; they are not necessarily data-intensive. Dicodess in an example of an open source model-driven DSS generator.