The Impact of Business Intelligence (BI) and Decision Support Systems (DSS) : Exploratory Study

Purpose – This study aims to study the importance of BI / DSS for organizations, as well as, investigate the organizational factors that influence the effective use of BI or DSS systems in a given organization. The researcher used the “University Library” and start gathering information about the emergence of BI and DSS techniques and understand the concepts, applications, and usefulness in different industries especially the retail one. The researcher also used “Google Scholar” in order to find reliable articles with valid information. Moreover, the researcher went through more than 20 articles to find the relevant information and used different keywords in the search queries so that the results provide the most relevant articles. The result of this study shown that the BI system can affect positively the decision support system (DSS) and make the right decision by gathering a huge amount of data, as well as, DSS can add value to the organization's performance by increasing organizational control, personal efficiency and the effectiveness of problem-solving. Limitation of this study was related to the source of data just a few amounts of data gathering from 20 articles, and some data gathering only from one UNSW library, where the data may be gathered from other libraries or even other articles can be different. This study can assist organizations in giving the right decision support systems (DSS) by collecting correct data using BI, data mining or even any related information from various sources about the topic associated with the organizations. This, in turn, will affect the organization by giving the most appropriate, and accurate decision, moreover, which will also affect the institution's job function. This study has increased the body of knowledge about the emerging of big data and BI and how it can help the organization in giving the right decision making, Furthermore, BI offers insight into the importance of big data in the minds of decision-makers in organizations, that will bring for them the intention to repeat such that systems in future