Nowadays it is usual that organizations move in high-velocity environments, and decision makers of such kind of organization must make a high-quality decision rapidly, probably with huge amount of information that not always is complete. Some latest developments in IT could support the decision process faster and at a lower cost.
According to our reading of the literature, it seems that the decision process is conditioned by five forces or tensions. The forces are:
Forces between the need for quick decision and the decision process
Forces related to the need of empowering middle managers and teams
Forces around the need of action and the need for the safest execution
Forces between planned action and emergence and improvisation
Forces around the effort to eliminate organizational silos.
Each of this forces in some way conditioned the decision process and it must take into account in the process of designing a DSS for a particular organization.
To improve our understanding about the decision process it is important to try to depict better how is the human problem solving activity. It is clear that humans have been allowed with intellectual capabilities that allow us to adapt to our environment to protect ourselves and to ensure the availability of adequate supply of food and water under the most extreme circumstances. More over, these capabilities have evolved from very primitive beginnings into much more sophisticated and specialized skills.
Humans are by nature inquisitive seekers of information, everything they observe and experience in their living must have an explanation. It seems that this quest for understanding it is central to our success in adapting to our living world, but in this process it also crucial our degree to accept partial understandings and superficial explanations when the degree of complexity exceed our mental capabilities. That means that partial and incomplete information it is considered better that not information at all it seems that the learning it is done in an iterative approach, initial solution with a oversimplified problem and then refined. Other characteristic is our inherent resistance to change and aversion to risk taking, meaning that once we have found an apparently explanation we tend to lose interest in pursuing its intrinsic shortcomings and we increase our believe in its validity. We are continuously discovering that what we believe to be true is only a partly true or not true at all.
Decision support systems: concepts and resources for managers. By Daniel J. Power
Handbook on Decision Support Systems 2: Variations. By Frada Burstein, Clyde W. Holsapple
Intelligent Decision Making: An AI-Based Approach. By Gloria Phillips-Wren, Nikhil Ichalkaranje, Lakhmi Jain
This article is the first of a serie that will cover the DSS subject, from history to best practices to implement DSS in a real context.
The author ________ is part of the Hercules Research Project.