Decision Support Systems are a specific class of computerized information system that supports business and organizational decision-making activities. A properly designed Decision Support System is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.
Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present would be Accessing all of your current information assets, including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses and data marts Comparative sales figures between one week and the next Projected revenue figures based on new product sales assumptions The consequences of different decision alternatives, given past experience in a context that is described
Example
A national on-line book seller wants to begin selling its products internationally but first needs to determine if that will be a wise business decision. The vendor can use a DSS to gather information from its own resources to determine if the company has the ability or potential ability to expand its business and also from external resources, such as industry data, to determine if there is indeed a demand to meet. The DSS will collect and analyze the data and then present it in a way that can be interpreted by humans. Some decision support systems come very close to acting as artificial intelligence agents.
