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Critical success factors in evolving decision support systems

The development of decision support systems (DSS) requires an interdisciplinary research approach and involves disciplines such as computer science, decision idea, statistics, psychology, information and information technology, and organizational science. The notion of DSS appeared in the 1970s when it was proposed for computerized systems supplying assistance in dealing with semi-structured and unstructured problems. Over the next 30 years, new issues such as the increasing severity of environmental problems and increasing conflicts in the exploitation of natural resources have added new challenges to DSS development. Due to the rapid advances in computer science and related research fields, the boundaries of DSS have expanded such that the understanding of what a DSS is (or might be) has become less apparent. According to Power (1997), any system supporting decision-making, encompassing boss information systems, boss support systems, geographic information systems, online analytical processing and software agents, may be called a DSS. The ambiguity of DSS delineation has been discussed by several authors, some of who proceed even farther by examining DSS as having matured to the issue where they have lost their persona and became part of the mainstream area of management information systems.

Under the pressure of new challenges, DSS have developed considerably. Emphasis on the multi-perspective exploration of problems and shifting the target of DSS from semi-structured or unstructured to “wicked” problems are occasionally seen as a paradigm change. The wicked (or tricky, thorny) difficulty as characterised by Rittel and Webber (1973) in the context of social planning has no ultimately correct, unambiguous formulation. The authors sharp out that when solving a wicked difficulty, the solution of one aspect may reveal another, more convoluted problem. In such situations, the process of solving a difficulty is identical with the process of understanding its nature; they are mutually concomitant. Only solid solutions which have been formulated and analysed convey a deeper insight and understanding of what the difficulty actually is. Wicked problems have a number of distinctive characteristics, including: (i) the stakeholders engaged see the difficulty from their own perspective and cannot easily agree on what difficulty to solve; (ii) the alternative options are not readily available and have to be discovered; (iii) they have no implicit stopping direct and the decision processes are only finished when the resources for decision-making run out; (iv) there is no clearly stated target, and the solution may be good/bad but not ever true/false.

Several international initiatives (e.g. Agenda 21 and 6th Environment Action Programme of the European Union (EU)) have emphasised the importance of farther DSS development, and a large numbers of scientific publications and several special issues of international journals have been dedicated to these new challenges faced by the DSS development, encompassing reviews and evaluations of existing systems. Nevertheless, despite the numerous DSS evolved for water resource management, the require to farther evolve decision-support tools in this area is broadly recognised. Growing information of the links among watershed components, a better understanding of the feedback among processes operating at ...