DSS Resources

A Brief History of
Decision Support Systems

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by D. J. Power

If we look back in the literature, we find the following statement by Keen and Stabell on the origins of the DSS concept. "The concept of Decision Support has evolved from two main areas of research: the theoretical studies of organizational decisionmaking done at the Carnegie Institute of Technology during the late 1950s and early '60s and the technical work on interactive computer systems, mainly carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s." (cf., Addison Wesley series on Decision Support foreword by Peter G.W. Keen and Charles B. Stabell, May 1978). These two pioneers in the DSS field are probably identifying work by Herbert Simon and Allen Newell at Carnegie and research on interactive computing at MIT by Tom Gerrity and others.

In 1971, Michael S. Scott Morton completed the book Management Decision Systems: Computer-Based Support for Decision Making (see table of contents). The book was his MIT doctoral dissertation. Scott Morton focused on how computers and analytical models could help or support managers in making key decisions. He conducted an experiment in which managers actually used a Management Decision System (MDS). His MDS was used by marketing and production managers to coordinate production planning for laundry equipment. Scott Morton's research was a pioneering implementation, definition and research test of a specific DSS.

T.P. Gerrity, Jr. focused on design issues in his 1971 Sloan Management Review article titled "The Design of Man-Machine Decision Systems: An Application to Portfolio Management". His system was designed to support investment managers in their daily administration of a clients' stock portfolio.

In 1974, Gordon Davis at the University of Minnesota published his influential text Management Information Systems: Conceptual Foundations, Structure, and Development. Davis's Chapter 12 titled "Information System Support for Decision Making", and Chapter 13 titled "Information System Support for Planning and Control" created the setting for the development of a broad foundation for DSS research and practice.

By 1975, J. D. C. Little was expanding the frontiers of computer-supported modeling. Little's DSS called Brandaid was designed to support product, promotion, pricing and advertising decisions. Little, in his Management Science article titled "Models and Managers: The Concept of a Decision Calculus" identified criteria for designing models to support management decision making. His criteria included: robustness, ease of control, simplicity, and completeness of relevant detail.

Klein and Methlie (1995) note "A study of the origin of DSS has still to be written. It seems that the first DSS papers were published by PhD students or professors in business schools, who had access to the first time-sharing computer system: Project MAC at the Sloan School, the Dartmouth Time Sharing Systems at the Tuck School.  In France, HEC was the first French business school to have a time-sharing system (installed in 1967), and the first DSS papers were published by professors of the School in 1970.  The term SIAD ('Systèmes Interactif d'Aide à la Décision' the French term DSS) and the concept of DSS were developed independently in France, in several articles by professors of the HEC working on the SCARABEE project which started in 1969 and ended in 1974. The concept of DSS and a design and implementation strategy for these systems are described in several papers related to this project" (see table of contents).

Peter G. W. Keen and Michael Scott Morton's DSS textbook titled Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective was published in 1978 (see table of contents). Their text provided a comprehensive behavioral orientation to DSS analysis, design, implementation, evaluation and development.

In 1979, John Rockart published a ground breaking article in the Harvard Business Review that led to the development of executive information systems (EISs) or executive support systems (ESS).

The book Building Effective Decision Support Systems by Ralph Sprague and Eric Carlson (1982) was an important milestone (see table of contents). It provided a practical, understandable overview of how organizations could and should build DSS. Although it created some unrealistic expectations, the problem was more the limits of the technologies for building DSS than the limits of the concepts Sprague and Carlson presented. Bonczek, Holsapple, and Whinston (1981) in a classic book titled Foundations of Decision Support Systems broadened the field of DSS and provided an abstract framework for designing DSS (see table of contents).

In the middle and late 1980s, Executive Information Systems (EIS) and GDSS evolved from the single user and model-oriented DSS. Beginning in about 1990, datawarehousing and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) began broading the realm of DSS. The concept of data warehousing is really that of a decision support system with an enterprise-wide scope. The subject-oriented information content of On-Line Analytical Applications (OLAP) is comparable to that of data warehouses and even derived from data warehouses, but the analytical tools are more extensive. Paul Gray asserts that around 1993 the data warehouse and the EIS people found one another and the two niche technologies have been converging. See the Journal of Information Systems Management Winter 1997 review in Book Reviews by Paul Gray for his comments.

Today, a number of disciplines provide the substantive foundations for DSS development and research. Database researchers have contributed tools and research on managing data. Management Science has developed mathematical models for use in DSS and provided evidence on the advantages of modeling in problem solving. Cognitive Science, especially Behavioral Decision Making research has provided descriptive information that has assisted in DSS design and has generated hypotheses for DSS research. Some other important related fields include: Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction, Simulation Methods; Software Engineering; Telecommunications. See also: Computing; Information Sciences.

Sean Eom has a recent on-line paper that addresses research streams titled Assessing the Contributions of Systems Science to the Development of the Decision Support System Research Subspecialties. It was presented at the AIS Americas Conference, Phoenix, AZ in August 1996.

This web page focuses on the history of Decision Support Systems. It is an evolving hypertext document. Please send comments about the Brief History of DSS to me, daniel.power@uni.edu. I'll include them in this section of the document. I reserve the right to edit comments for length. Comments will be included as seems appropriate.

References

Thanks for visiting. If you have any suggestions for improving this brief history of DSS, I'd like to hear from you.

How to cite

A Brief History of Decision Support Systems should be cited as:

Power, D.J. A Brief History of Decision Support Systems. DSS Resources, World Wide Web, http://dss.cba.uni.edu/dss/dsshistory.html, 1999.

The URL for this page is http://dss.cba.uni.edu/dss/dsshistory.html
 
DSS Resources (Decision Support Systems Resources) is maintained and all its pages are copyrighted (c) 1995-1999 by D. J. Power, Professor of Information Systems and Management, College of Business Administration, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50613-0125, Work phone: 319 273-2987, FAX: 319 273-2922, E-Mail: Daniel.Power@UNI.edu, Initially created and published by D. J. Power March 29, 1996; last updated March 22, 1999, see disclaimer.