ADOPTION OF DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS (DSS) TO SUPPLEMENT ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION MAKING

Abstract

Business or organization is a combination of Marketing/R & D, manpower, financing, planning and overall management resources. The combination of these interrelated resources performs the activities necessary for sustaining the organization or business as an entity. The manpower part of the organization performs the respective jobs according to instructions from the middle management which in turn refers to the top management. The finance department operates independently of the production/operations part and is responsible for financing the various ongoing projects as well as the organizational assets. The management part is really what drives the organization; management takes all the important decision on how to spend money, where to spend money and how often to change product design/specifications in conjunction with the Marketing/R & D department. All decision related activities that the management, Marketing/R & D Department has to undergo are of paramount importance as a single rash decision will impact the organization very hard economically. Therefore to supplement the decision making on a logical perspective DSS can be employed which will support and verify the Decision Making process so that it can benefit the organization in the long term. At present, the process of decision making in most local organizations, is done without any aid of technology, and based solely on the experience of the decision maker, while this may result in a decision which is good for the organization, but there is still an element left to chance, because of the lack of information and/or computation of all the relevant factors. And the decisions for a similar task can vary depending on the experience of the decision maker. With a Decision Support System, the experience variable in the process of decision making is removed to provide more consistent performance across the process of decision making. In addition to this benefit, the Decision Support Systems have an added advantage of organization and presentation of all the necessary information relevant to the task of decision making. The combination of all these benefits give the decision maker an unprecedented advantage with no factor or variable affecting his performance in decision making along with consistently good decisions which is always good for the organization in terms of reputation, its profits, stocks and shares. ii Adoption of Decision Support Systems (DSS) to supplement Organizational Decision Making. This research is focused on the adoption of decision support systems to supplement the organizational decision making which is beneficial for the organization in both long and short terms, and as such for the implementation of decision support systems, various factors or variables are involved, these variables were selected after careful study and review of literature involving the applications of decision support system. The design work for this research is purely a scientific one, following a structured approach with forst specifying the research question to narrow down and focus on the selected problem and then selecting the target population, sample size and unit of analysis. After that an appropriate questionnaire was designed which would help in collection of the information related to the research from professionals working in various organizational roles and setups, what this process intended was to isolate the opinion of these professionals in different industries and then separate out their opinions and gather them based on agreement or disagreement with the statements of the questionnaire. The data obtained from the questionnaire was then scrutinized to verify that the sample size chosen was statistically significant and no possible sampling errors were present in the data, it is normally distributed and the population and sample mean do not have significant variance, so a few statistical tests were applied on the data, namely frequency distribution tests, and these tests concluded that the data was statistically significant and the sample size was correct to deduce appropriate results from the data, after this process the results were inferred from the data, and presented in graphical form to calculate the relationships of the variables affecting the decision support system implementation. The research was very beneficial as it helped explore a unique application of the decision support systems, which if properly followed would be valuable for organizational setup, in short this can help maintain the organization on the competitive edge. Personally the research was very valuable to me as it introduced a proper framework for the implementation of decision support systems, and a scientific method for investigating new problems, a flowchart was designed by me which would help in the selection of appropriate system according to the organizational setup and requirements. The results that are obtained from the thesis research are in favor of implementing decision support systems in Pakistani Organizations, and are positive in the success of this system if the potential of these systems is truly realized and their role accepted in the process of decision making.