Introduction to the special issue on decision support systems
- PDF / 71,238 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 595 x 794 pts Page_size
- 18 Downloads / 205 Views
& 2005 JIT Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 0268-3962/05 $30.00 palgrave-journals.com/jit
Editorial
Introduction to the special issue on decision support systems Journal of Information Technology (2005) 20, 65–66. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000040
Introduction ecision support systems (DSS) appeared as a research field and an information systems type in the early 1970s. Researchers and managers strove to improve support to management decision makers through leveraging the data stored in management information systems (MIS), which had evolved a decade or more earlier. These transaction processing and reporting systems provided data that could be analysed and modelled using ‘hard’ tools and concepts from operations research such as optimisation and simulation, and ‘soft’ approaches from behavioural decision theory. These personal DSS were usually developed by individual, or small groups of, managers to support a single decision task. At the time, the development of these systems was aided by, firstly, the minicomputer with moderately user-friendly software for accessing and manipulating databases and financial modelling tools, then later the microcomputer, with spreadsheet software in particular. This support of the individual manager has continued with better, faster, and more flexible software, but DSS has also evolved to accommodate many forms:
D
groups of various types through group support systems (GSS) and negotiation support systems (NSS), particular types of decision making, both individual and institutional, through executive information systems (EIS), often now referred to as business intelligence (BI), expansion of these EIS to a larger scale through data warehouses, and also to the use of artificial intelligence (fuzzy logic and expert systems) in intelligent DSS (IDSS), and knowledge-management-based DSS focused on organisational learning and knowledge sharing. DSS research of these various forms is now published and presented in many major journals and conferences, some relating to IS in general and others specialising in DSS. IFIP Working Group 8.3 2004 Conference on Decision Support Systems The IFIP Working Group 8.3 2004 Conference on Decision Support Systems was held in Prato, Italy, in July, 2004. This biannual conference is probably the major DSS conference and the 2004 conference contained 86 high-quality papers covering all of the above sub-disciplines of DSS. A number of these papers were more highly rated by the reviewers and editors and were nominated for consideration by a small group of journals. A number of these indicated a preference
for the Journal of Information Technology. These were reviewed by the editors of the special issue and, from these, eight papers were selected for consideration for this special issue. The authors of these papers were asked to expand and improve the papers in specific ways. Finally, five papers were accepted following this process. These five papers form the Journal of Information Technology Special Issue on Decision Support Systems. The
Data Loading...
