A Brief History of DSS

Information Systems researchers and technologists have built and investigated Decision Support Systems (DSS) for approximately 40 years; D.J. Power's paper ..... and explores the developments in DSS from the model-driven DSS in the late 1960s to the implementation of Web-based DSS in the mid-1990s.

Different people perceive the field of Decision Support Systems from various ..... points and report different accounts of what happened and what was important (cf., Arnott & Pervan, 2005; Eom & Lee, 1990b; McCosh & Correa-Perez, 2006; Power, 2003; Power, 2004a; Silver, 1991).

In ....., a major historical turning point was Michael S. Scott Morton's (1967) dissertation field research at Harvard University; Morton's study involved building, implementing and then testing an interactive, model-driven management decision system.

Fellow Harvard Ph.D. student Andrew McCosh asserts that the concept of decision support systems was first ..... by Scott Morton in February 1964 in a basement office in Sherman Hall, Harvard Business School in a discussion they had about Morton's dissertation.

The pioneering work of Dantzig, Engelbart and Forrester influenced the feasibility of building computerized decision support systems; in the 1960s, they developed the first hypermedia-groupware system called NLS, which provided for on-screen video teleconferencing and was a ..... to group decision support systems.

In 1960, J.C.R. Licklider published his ideas about the future role of multiaccess interactive computing in a paper titled 'Man-Computer .....'; he saw close man-computer interaction as enhancing both the quality and efficiency of human problem-solving, and his paper provided a guide for computer research to follow.

In 1974, Gordon Davis published his ..... text on Management Information Systems; he defined a Management Information System as 'an integrated, man/machine system for providing information to support the operations, management, and decision-making functions in an organization'.

In 1979, John Rockart of the Harvard Business School published a ground-..... article that led to the development of executive information systems (EISs) or executive support systems (ESS); Rockart developed the concept of using information systems to display critical success metrics for managers.

Donovan and Madnick (1977) classified DSS as either institutional or .....: the former supports decisions that are recurring, while the latter supports querying data for one time requests.

Finally, Sprague and Carlson's (1982) book 'Building Effective Decision Support Systems' was an important .....: it further explained the DSS framework of data base, model base and dialog generation and management software, and provided a practical overview of how organizations should build DSS.