DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: PRESENT AND FUTURE TRENDS

As competition gets tougher and tougher, companies have to implement new management systems to stay efficient. Along business performance monitoring application, executive information systems, business intelligence systems and decision support systems (DSS) help managers to lead their companies successfully and survive into the future. They are interactive, flexible and adjustable systems that offer support in solving unstructured or semistructured management problems, meant to improve the decision process. They are developed to assist the tactical and strategic level of management. The classic architecture of a DSS contains the database management system, the model base management system and the interface management system. The evolved DSS have also a knowledge component that provides the information needed for solving certain aspects of the problems. According to D. J. Power, at a conceptual level the DSS can be classified into the following categories: data-driven systems, model-driven systems, knowledgedriven systems, document-driven systems, communication-driven systems, intra and inter organizational systems, specialized systems and Web-based systems. At the end of the paper some opinions concerning the future of DSS are presented.