Decisive and Incisive The Path of DSS

Since the 1960s Management Information Systems (MIS) have become increasingly relied upon and sought after to support business processes. In particular, those classed as decision support systems have gained increasing relevance as larger amounts of data have been generated and stored within systems. Decisions may be made using the whole or a large part of the organisational dataset because of the transfer of data processing from people to processors. Relieving people of this manual processing, these systems encourage time to be spent on tasks more suitable to human processing and less suited to computerised processing. Internet availability and usage has driven a knowledge and comfort level with abstractions in systems and a refocusing of systems designers on usability. Organisations are increasingly requiring freedom of access to their organisational systems while absent or distant from wired offices in line with the expectations brought about by internetworked technologies and the idea of a knowledge based society. This paper follows the discourse of Decision Support Systems from the MIS literature through the challenges and opportunities for organisational mobility enabled by networked technologies, communication mechanisms and peoples increased proficiency with abstractions in system interfaces.