Distributed decision support and organizational connectivity: A case study

Abstract

While the Internet has been grabbing most of the attention of the information systems researchers and practitioners, online transaction processing systems still take the lion’s share of business information systems. Although many Decision Support Systems (DSS) have been developed, they failed to become mainstream products due to their limited availability, applicability, and interoperability. In this paper, we propose a script language to make use of the vast resource of the Internet as a means (i) to better make DSS known to potential users, and (ii) to allow construction of DSS from DSS components stored on various Internet sites. With the proposed script language, we contend that DSS would have a greater potential of gaining a larger share of use among the business community. Contrasting to other approaches that advocate for a central clearinghouse of DSS components, we propose a bottom-up strategy, i.e., users and developers of DSS’s cooperate in weaving a web of distributed DSS components to form a federated network of on-line DSS repositories. The purpose of the proposed script language is to ensure effective search of DSS components and rapid development and deployment of application-specific DSS. The proposed method is scalable to support distributed platforms using multiple processors and/or application domains. A case study derived from a real life application in a multi-national company is discussed to illustrate the proposed approach.