An Approach to the Development of a Decision Support Systems Tool

Decision Support Systems (DSS) are a form computerised information systems to provide support to decision makers in order to enhance the effectiveness of their decision malong process in ill-structured environments. DSS is now widely acceoted and has attracted a lot of attention from both academics and business community. The literature abounds with accounts of systems that claimed to have incorporated some of the basic ideas of DSS. Majority of these DSS offer assiatance primarily in the evaluation and appraisal steps of the decision making process and pay inadequate attention to problem formulation step. At present, there exists little understanding of how DSS can be designed to support problem formulation. In this paper, we describe an approach adopted in the development of a DSS tool to assist in problem formulation. This approach is based on the principles of structures modeling (SM). [Authors' abstract].