An integrated decision support environment for organisational decision making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a stand-alone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organisational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organisation (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed environment. Such systems are designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenge. This paper proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organisational decision making. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a combination of tight and loose integration approaches for information exchange and communication. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates a good balance between flexibility and reliability.