concept of decision support systems was first articulated by Scott Morton in February 1964 in a basement office in Sherman Hall,

Harvard Business School (McCosh email, 2002) in a discussion they had about Scott Mortons dissertation. During 1966, Scott Morton (1971) studied how computers and analytical models could help managers make a recurring key business planning decision. Forrester was involved in building the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system for North America completed in 1962. SAGE is probably the first computerized data-driven DSS. By April 1964, the development of the IBM System 360 and other more powerful mainframe systems made it practical and cost-effective to develop Management Information Systems (MIS) for large companies (cf., Davis, 1974). These early MIS focused on providing managers with structured, periodic reports and the information was primarily from accounting and transaction processing systems, but the systems did not provide interactive support to assist managers in decision making.

Management Information Systems primarily focused on structured decisions and suggested that the supporting information systems for semi-structured and unstructured decisions should be termed Decision Support Systems

Decisions may be described as structured or unstructured, depending upon whether or not the decision-making process can be explicitly described prior to its execution. So they are decisions in which some aspect of the problem are structured and others are unstructured In other words it's a half impulsive not very well thought decision

Unstructured decisions are those in which the decision maker must provide judgement, evaluation, and insight to solve the problem. Each of these unstructured decisions are non-recurring by nature and are most difficult decisions to make. Also these decisions are new, important, non-routine, and infrequent or occur only once. Conversely, a structured decision is where all three components of data, process, and evaluation are determined and fairly well specified. Structured decisions usually are recurring or made regularly and are easier decisions to make. The nature of structured decisions are that they are repetitive, routine and have a definite procedure for handling them so that they do not have to be treated each time as if they were new. When or where problem is recurring and repetitive, such as inventory control, the common factors can be identified in order to identify a particular course of action, where a defined set of procedure can be planned for their solution. Therefore procedures for obtaining the best solution are standardised, have clearly defined objectives and also clearly specified inputs and outputs. For instance, a structured decision may be the routine credit-granting decision made by many businesses and the way data is being collated consistently over time. For structured decisions it is possible and desirable to develop computer programs that collect and combine the data, hence giving the process a high degree of consistency. An example

of structured decision, is when a sales account representative often has to make decisions about extending credit to customers by consulting the firms customer database that contains credit information. If the customer met the firms prespecified criteria for granting credit, the account representative would grant that customer credit to make a purchase.

defined a Management Information System as "an integrated, man/machine system for providing information to support the operations, management, and decisionmaking functions in an organization. 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.

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, personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. A passive DSS is a system that aids the process of decision making, but that cannot bring out explicit decision suggestions or solutions. An active DSS can bring out such decision suggestions or solutions. A cooperative DSS allows the decision maker (or its advisor) to modify, complete, or refine the decision suggestions provided by the system, before sending them back to the system for validation.

A communication-driven DSS supports more than one person working on a shared task; examples include integrated tools like Microsoft's NetMeeting or Groove A data-driven DSS or data-oriented DSS emphasizes access to and manipulation of a time series of internal company data and, sometimes, external data. A document-driven DSS manages, retrieves, and manipulates unstructured information in a variety of electronic formats. A knowledge-driven DSS provides specialized problem-solving expertise stored as facts, rules, procedures, or in similar structures. A model-driven DSS emphasizes access to and manipulation of a statistical, financial, optimization, or simulation model. Model-driven DSS use data and parameters provided by users to assist decision makers in analyzing a situation; they are not necessarily data-intensive. Dicodess is an example of an open source modeldriven DSS generator.

1. Database management system (DBMS). A DBMS serves as a data bank for the DSS. It stores large quantities of data that are relevant to the class of problems for which the DSS has been designed and provides logical data structures (as opposed to the physical data structures) with which the users interact. A DBMS separates the users from the physical aspects of the database structure and processing. It should also be capable of informing the user of the types of data that are available and how to gain access to them. 2. Model-base management system (MBMS) The role of MBMS is analogous to that of a DBMS. Its primary function is providing independence between special models that are used in a DSS from the applications that use them. The purpose of an MBMS is to transform data from the DBMS into information that is useful in decision making. Since many problems that the user of a DSS will cope with may be unstructured, the MBMS should also be capable of assisting the user in model building. 3. Dialog generation and management system (DGMS). The main product of an interaction with a DSS is insight. As their users are often managers who are not computer-trained, DSSs need to be equipped with intuitive and easy-to-use interfaces. These interfaces aid in model building, but also in interaction with the model, such as gaining insight and recommendations from it. The primary responsibility of a DGMS is to enhance the ability of the system user to utilize and benefit from the DSS.

The Characteristics and Capabilities of DSS are: 1. Support for decision makers (mainly in semi- and un-structured situation) by bringing together human judgment and computerized information. 2. Support for all managerial levels, ranging from top executives to line managers. 3. Support for individuals (from different departments, organizational levels or different organizations) as well as groups of decision makers working somewhat independently virtual teams through collaborative Web tools. 4. Support for independent or sequential decisions that may be made once, several times or repeatedly. 5. Support in all phases of decision-making process (intelligence, design, choice, implementation ). 6. Support for a variety of decision-making process and style. 7. The decision maker should be reactive, able to confront changing conditions quickly and able to adapt the DSS to meet these changes. DSS are flexible, so users can add, delete, combine, change or rearrange basic elements. 8. User-friendliness, strong graphical capabilities and natural language interactive humanmachine interface can greatly increase the effectiveness of DSS, Most new DSS application use Web-based interfaces. 9. Improvement the effectiveness of decision making rather than its efficiency. When DSS are deployed, decision making often takes longer but the decisions are better. 10. The decision maker has complete control over all steps of the decision-making process in solving a problem a DSS aims to support not to replace the decision maker. 11. End users are able to develop and modify simple systems by themselves. Larger systems can be built with assistance from information system specialist. Online analytical process (OLAP) and data mining software, with data warehouses, allow users to build very large and complex DSS. 12. Models are generally utilized to analyze decision-making situations. The modelling capability enable experimentation with different strategies under different configurations. 13. Access is provided to a variety of data sources, formats and types, including GIS, multimedia and object oriented. 14. Can be employed as a standalone tool used by an individual decision maker in one location or distributed throughout an organisation and in several organizations along the supply chain. It can be integrated with other DSS or applications and it can be distributed internally and externally using networking and Web technologies