Decision support system

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article was the basis of content and / or formal deficiencies in the quality assurance side of the portal economy entered.
You can help by eliminating the shortcomings mentioned there or by participating in the discussion .

Decision support systems (in short: EUS or . English Decision Support Systems (abbreviated DSS )) are software systems that are relevant for human decision makers for operational and strategic tasks Retrieving information, recycle, put together clearly and help in the evaluation.

This includes functions for sorting and filtering data , their flexible display and evaluation options such as sums or average calculations, comparisons, etc. Further functions allow the execution of model calculations (scenarios, forecasts) and the linking of the data with optimization algorithms.

Are important

  • flexible adaptation to changing content and technical conditions and changing issues
  • flexible change of classifications of relevance of information
  • Ease of use even by the decision-makers themselves

The interpretation, evaluation and assessment of the information and the decision-making remains a matter for people. The task of the system is to present the information clearly and automatically point out special features, such as highlighting limit value violations.

In addition to this task of evaluating merged data, there is also the collection, updating and administration (such as historizing and deleting) of individual information.

Efforts to create such systems have been made since the early beginnings of the computer age (from the mid-1950s) (General Ledger), when data sets created for operational purposes and the progressive development of computer performance triggered requests for more detailed information. And new, extended system components of this kind continue to emerge, driven by new requirements and made possible by further technical developments.

The term "decision support system" is used here as an umbrella term for systems with the characteristics mentioned above. In addition, it is the German-language equivalent of Decision Support Systems, or DSS for short , a specific variant of this type of system that coined the name of the whole family. In similar terms, e.g. B. "Decision software" are also software products that support the evaluation of alternatives in decision-making processes , e.g. B. according to the scoring method.

Representative

Decision support systems were created depending on the point in time of development using other, more recent technical architecture principles (which were usually positioned by their manufacturers with considerable marketing effort) and also carried their names ("our MIS"). The best-known representatives of these architectures are listed below (in chronological order); they can be divided into three categories: data focus, model focus and presentation focus:

system introduction focus
GL (General Ledger) Mid 1950s Data focus
MIS (Management Information Systems) Late 1960s Data focus
DSS (Decision Support Systems) Early 1970s Model focus
EIS (Executive Information Systems) Late 1980s Presentation focus
Data warehouse Early 1990s Data focus
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Early 1990s Model focus
Business intelligence Early 1990s Presentation focus
Business performance management Late 1990s Model focus

General Ledger

GL accesses the pure account assignment processes of corporate accounting (which can only contribute to a limited extent to decision-making due to its primarily external addressees) and offers the possibility of enriching these with evaluable information (customer number, plant, material item, etc.). See General Ledger Accounting .

Management information system (MIS)

MIS is the only EUS that is no longer used in its original form, as it was very complicated to use: A department with technicians was specially employed to create the reports, as the file systems at that time were only accessed using keys could.

DSS (Decision Support Systems)

DSS was the first approach that brought management (but also landscape management and disaster management ) support, as models and methods were stored in a DSS in order to carry out simulations ( Monte Carlo simulation, among others).

EIS / FIS (management information system)

Since the required evaluations were usually carried out in a hierarchy level below the top management and these were then manually prepared graphically in order to present them, a system was developed with which the management could directly access graphic evaluations - management information system .

Data warehouse

The EIS has always (rightly) been accused of working too superficially, since the data layer only plays a secondary role. The data warehouse is a kind of return to the essentials; the data layer. Today, a data warehouse is usually accessed with an OLAP system or EIS. It can serve as a database for a decision support system.

OLAP

Online analytical processing is the multi-dimensional storage and evaluation of data in the format of so-called OLAP cubes .

Business intelligence

Under Business Intelligence refers to tools for the distribution of information in the enterprise in the form of metrics dashboards , reports and analyzes.

Business performance management

Business performance management is the extension of the business intelligence approach to include process-oriented tools for planning, forecasts and simulations.

See also

Web links