Decision Support Systems

Decision support systems (DSS) are a class of computerized information system that support decision-making activities. Decision support systems are designed artifacts that have specific functionality. Five more specific Decision Support System types include i) communications-driven, ii) data-driven, iii) document-driven, iv) knowledge-driven, and v) model-driven systems. Communications technologies are central to communications-driven DSS for supporting decision-making. Data-driven DSS provide access to large data stores and analytics to create information. Document-driven DSS use documents to provide information for decision making. Knowledge-driven DSS are sometimes generically called expert systems or recommender systems. Model-driven DSS use quantitative models for functionality and have been called model-oriented DSS and computationally oriented DSS. The term knowledge management system (KMS) encompasses both document and knowledge-driven DSS. Holsapple and Whinston proposed a slightly different classification identifying text-oriented DSS, database-oriented DSS, spreadsheet-oriented DSS, solver-oriented DSS, rule-oriented DSS, and compound DSS.