The Decision Support Systems (DSS) landscape has been witnessing a major shift from mainframe to client-server implementation since the early 1990s. As a part of this evolving trend, Web-based and Web-enabled DSS have been fast emerging as a crucial part of managerial information and decision support systems. Web-based DSS implementations, using technologies like Web Server, HTML, and SQL Server, have made their appearance around mid-1990s. Since late 1990s, however, there appears to be an increasing interest in, and some evidence of shift towards, Web-enabled DSS. In contrast to total redevelopment using the Web technologies, in the Web-enabled DSS, the key areas of an application continue to remain on the legacy system but are made accessible using the Web technology. There is an argument in the literature that Web-enabled DSS are much faster and more cost-effective compared to Web-based DSS (Power, 2002). In this paper, a hypothetical case study involving the Monte Carlo simulation for financial decision-making is presented to illustrate two arguments. First, an argument is presented in favor of both Web-based and Web-enabled DSS by illustrating how the required decision support functionality is made available to the user through a browser and internet connectivity, without the need for specific DSS software on the client computer. It is suggested to be very useful for those economies which are particularly disadvantaged in terms of technological base and infrastructure. Second, the distinction between Web-based and Web-enabled technologies is discussed and it is argued that the current trend toward wholesale abandonment of legacy systems needs to be reconsidered in favor of incremental adaptation toward web-enablement.
The
Decision Support Systems (DSS) landscape in general has been witnessing a major
shift from main-frame to client-server implementation, since the early 1990s.
As a part of this evolving trend, Web-based and Web-enabled DSS have been fast
emerging as a crucial part of managerial and financial information and decision
support systems.
In
this paper, the impact, implications, and limitations of Web-enablement of decision
support systems are discussed using a simple case study. The paper is organized
as follows: First, the trend toward Web technologies and the underlying reasons
are presented. Second, the distinction between Web-based and Web-enabled technologies
is offered by way of clarifying the terminology. Next, the basic architecture
of Web technologies for decision support is provided, followed by a case study
and a discussion of the prospects, consequences, and challenges of Web technologies. |
