Decision support systems in context

Excerpt

Decision support systems comprise one of the major expansions in the information systems discipline (Burstein and Holsapple 2008a). In this special issue of Information Systems and e-Business Management, we are concerned with an important frontier of decision support system (DSS) research: the design, implementation, and usage of DSSs that address temporal, spatial, and environing aspects of decision making contexts. This is a turbulent frontier—characterized by rapid and incessant change, global markets, frequent surprises, security threats, mobility, vast volumes of knowledge, and continuing advances in distributed and intelligent systems. An organization’s competitiveness, and very survival, in such an environment depends on decision making processes that are productive (i.e., high output-to-input ratio), agile (i.e., alert and responsive), innovative (i.e., insightful, creative), and reputable (i.e., quality, trustworthy). Increasingly, the development and use of decision support systems need to be cognizant of the contextual aspects of the environment in which these decisional processes unfold. …