What is Decision Support System ?

A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized, human or a combination of both.
DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, and personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.
Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present includes:

• inventories of information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),
• comparative sales figures between one period and the next,
• projected revenue figures based on product sales assumptions.

Benefits

1. Improves personal efficiency
2. Speed up the process of decision making
3. Increases organizational control
4. Encourages exploration and discovery on the part of the decision maker
5. Speeds up problem solving in an organization
6. Facilitates interpersonal communication
7. Promotes learning or training
8. Generates new evidence in support of a decision
9. Creates a competitive advantage over competition
10. Reveals new approaches to thinking about the problem space
11. Helps automate managerial processes
12. Create Innovative ideas to speed up the performance

DSS Characteristics and capabilities

1. Solve semi-structured & Unstructured problems
2. Support To Managers At All Levels
3. support Individual and groups
4. Inter dependence and Sequence Decision.
5. Support Intelligence, Designee,Choice.
6. Adaptable & Flexible
7. Interactive and ease of use
8. Interactive and efficiency
9. Human control the process
10. Ease of development by end user
11. Modeling and Analysis
12. Data Access
13. Stand alone Integration & Web Based
14. Support Varieties Of Decision Process

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DSS Vs. DMS

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