What Is Decision Support System?

What are the (major) differences between a Management Information System and a Decision Support System please?

• Answer:

  Management Information System (MIS) and a Decision Support System (DSS) are similar as intuitive meaning: something that attain to the ability do decide-manage a business. And probably when someone wants to sell products and services in this area, they don’t have any interest to explicit the difference to the potential client … On the other side, the client is interested to the result produced by the DSS-MIS, not by the correct name of what he is using … But differences (even if theoretical) exist. - MIS is used to know the information to plan and control the business, mainly to decide about structured situations. - MIS is used by a broad concept of management (all the managers). - MIS can be understood as the way to communicate mass of biz info to the management, and consequently it can be identified with a formal, structured reporting system. - DSS is used to know what can drive the business, and this imply non-structured, variable situations (think to simulations, scenarios …). - DSS is requested by high-level management (the men that can make high decisions). - DSS is not structured and consequently the reporting system is flexible (normally, report are created “ad hoc” simply because every single report attain to a different problem-situation). - Moreover, DSS is also a non-strictly business-related science: theory about DSS studies mechanism and rules of the decisional process, and more advanced studies (especially academic or military) concern also automatic systems and artificial intelligence.