Behavioral Science—Decision Support Systems: A New Plateau of Opportunity or More Emperor's Clothing?

This month's column is an attempt to help each of us come to grips with DSS. We, as professional OR/MS practitioners and/or theoreticians, need to face the problem squarely. Are the DSS's truly new and more fertile environments for the effective incorporation of OR/MS in the organizational management processes? Or, are DSS concepts simply a new manifestation of the early naive expectations which were created by advocates in the evolution from electronic data processing (EDP) to management information systems (MIS)?

In order to shed any light on this “opportunity vs chimera” paradox of DSS, we need a common understanding of what we mean by DSS. A necessary step, then, is to offer a definition of DSS.