Business process re-engineering and decision support systems: a cautionary tale

Decision support systems is a branch of information systems that is concerned with improving the process of business decision making. The discipline began in the early 1970's amid claims that the process of decision making would be fundamentally changed or re-engineered by designing information systems to automate calculations and to provide easy access to appropriate information. Two decades later the full promise of decision support systems has not been realised. This paper uses a product life cycle model to analyse why new information systems ideas are often oversold. Using the history of decision support systems as a model, lessons for the current movement of business process re-engineering are drawn.