223Managerial support systems are the topic of this second of three chapters devoted to our survey of information
technology (IT) application areas. Managerial support systems are designed to provide support to a specific
manager or a small group of managers, and they include applications to support managerial decision making such
as group support systems, executive information systems, and expert systems. In contrast, the previous chapter
dealt with enterprise systems designed to support the entire organization or large portions of it, such as transaction
processing systems, data warehousing, groupware, and intranets. Together these two chapters provide a relatively
comprehensive picture of the applications of IT within a single organization (intraorganizationalsystems). To
complete the survey of IT applications, Chapter 7 will focus on e-business applicationsthat span organizational
boundaries, including B2C and B2B applications using the Internet. Taken as a set, these three chapters encompass
the great majority of IT applications in use today.
The enterprise systems discussed in the previous chapter are critical for running a business or any other type of
organization, and you will be dealing with many such enterprise systems, especially transaction processing systems
and groupware. Nevertheless, these enterprise systems have been designed to support the organization as a whole,
not you in particular or even a group of managers. Managerial support systems, in contrast, are intended to directly
support you and other managers as you make strategic and tactical decisions for your organizations. For example,
decision support systems (DSSs) are designed to help managers and other professionals analyze internal and
external data. By capturing the expertise of human experts, expert systems advise nonexperts in a particular
decision area. Group support systems are designed to make group work, especially meetings, more productive.
Executive information systems (EISs) provide easy-to-navigate summary data for the managers of an organization.
This chapter will explore these and other managerial support systems that are increasingly important in running
modern organizations.
Decision Support Systems
Adecision support system (DSS)is a computer-based system, almost always interactive, designed to assist
a manager (or another decision maker) in making decisions. A DSS incorporates both data and models to help
a decision maker solve a problem, especially a problem that is not well structured. The data are often
extracted from a transaction processing system or a data warehouse, but that is not always the case. The
model might be simple, such as a profit-and-loss model to calculate profit given certain assumptions, or
complex, such as an optimization model to suggest loadings for each machine in a job shop. DSSs and many
of the systems discussed in the following sections are not always justified by a traditional cost-benefit
approach; for these systems, many of the benefits are intangible, such as faster decision making and better
understanding of the data.
Figure 6.1 shows that a DSS requires three primary components: model management to apply the appropriate
model, data management to select and handle the appropriate data, and dialog management to facilitate the user