UNDERSTANDING DECISION SUPPORT IN A FINANCIAL SERVICES ORGANISATION

Abstract

The provision of decision support tools for highly uncertain decision situations has occupied researchers in the Decision Support Systems (DSS) area since the term was initially coined by Gorry and Scott Morton in 1971. In this paper, we used Humphreys and Bekerley’s 1985 representation levels framework and Adam and Pomerol’s 2008 framework of decision support types to categorise the decision problems faced by top managers in a large financial services firm and to match them against the decision support tools made available to managers, in order to measure the DSS maturity of the firm. The case shows a wealth of decision problems and activities spanning all categories of the framework and a very large portfolio of over fifty thousand decision support applications. Our analysis shows the importance of handovers, where the representations of decision problems proposed by top managers become increasingly refined and are handed over to other managers for fine tuning and implementation. The conclusions deliver insights into why developing applications that support the highly unstructured decision situations is so difficult and why so many good ideas are never implemented in organisations.