Dss Design--A Systemic View of Decision Support

Current DSS research is rather fragmentary, and typicallymyopic--it centers either on the decision situation which DSSsupport, or on DSS tools or generators. In this paper we adopta comprehensive view of DSS emphasizing their systemic nature.This entails identifying the links among the five aspects thatclassically characterize a system:1, the environment, i.e., decision situations and accesspatterns;2. the function (within this environment), i.e., types andlevels of decision support;3. the functional components that make it up, i.e., dialog,data, and model management;4. the arrangement, i.e., the linkages among the componentsand the assignment of functions to modules; and5. the resources consumed, i.e., hardware, software, humanskills, and data.The systemic view provides a concrete framework for theeffective design of DSS, and serves as a basis for accumulatingDSS research results