Supporting Decision Making

Section I Section II
“ Decision Support in Business” “ Artificial Intelligence Technologies
in Business”

 Decision Support Trends  Business and Artificial Intelligence

 Decision Support System  An Overview of Artificial Intelligence
 Management Information System  Expert System
 Online Analytical Processing  Developing Expert System
 Using Decision Support System  Neural Network
 Executive Information System  Fuzzy Logic System
 Enterprise Portals and Decision Support  Genetic Algorithms
 Knowledge Management System  Virtual Reality
 Intelligent Agets
 Section I
“ Decision Support in Business”
As companies migrate toward responsive e-business models, they are investing in new data-
driven decision support application frameworks that help them respond rapidly to changing
market conditions and customer needs.

Information, Decisions, and Management

 Decision Support Trends

The emerging class of applications focuses on personalized decision support,

modeling, information retrieval, data warehousing, what-if scenarios, and
reporting.
 Decision Support System (DSS)

Decision support systems are computer-based information systems that provide

interactive information support to managers and business professionals during the
decisionmaking process.
Decision support systems use :
(1) Analytical models
(2) Specialized databases
(3) A decision maker’s own insights and judgments
(4) An interactive, computer-based modeling process to support semistructured
business decisions.

Decision Support System Components

A DSS model base is a software component that consists of models used in
computational and analytical routines that mathematically express relationships
among variables.
 Management Information System (MIS)

MIS produces information products that support many of the day-

to-day decision-making needs of managers and business
professionals. This information takes the form of periodic,
exception, and demand reports and immediate responses to
inquiries.

Management Reporting Alternatives

 Periodic Scheduled Reports
 Exception Reports
 Demand Reports and Responses
 Push Reporting
 Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Online analytical processing enables managers and analysts to interactively examine

and manipulate large amounts of detailed and consolidated data from many
perspectives. OLAP involves analyzing complex relationships among thousands or
even millions of data items stored in data marts, data warehouses, and other
multidimensional databases to discover patterns, trends, and exception conditions.

Online analytical processing involves several basic analytical operations, including

consolidation, “drill-down,” and “slicing and dicing.”
Geographic Information and Data Visualization Systems
A geographic information system is a DSS that uses geographic databases to construct
and display maps, as well as other graphics displays that support decisions affecting the
geographic distribution of people and other resources. Many companies are using GIS
technology along with global positioning system (GPS) devices to help them choose
new retail store locations, optimize distribution routes, or analyze the demographics of
their target audiences.
 Using Decision Support System

A decision support system involves an interactive analytical modeling process.

Data Mining for Decision Support

Market basket analysis (MBA) is one of the most common and useful
types of data mining for marketing and is a key technique in business
analytics. The purpose of market basket analysis is to determine which
products customers purchase together with other products.

Consider some of the typical applications of MBA:

 Cross Selling
 Product Placement
 Affinity Promotion
 Survey Analysis
 Fraud Detection
 Customer Behavior
 Executive Information Systems (EIS)
Executive information systems are information systems that combine many of the
features of management information systems and decision support systems.
The goal of executive information systems was to provide top executives with
immediate and easy access to information about a firm’s critical success factors (CSFs)

Features of an Executive Information Systems