A Taxonomy of Sequential Decision Support Systems

Advances in information technology and explosion of internet technology is creating new professional users, across and within countries. These users are looking at technology to provide decision support for non-recurring tasks, to provide prototyping capabilities and to provide research support. However, organizational decision environment is also changing, creating havoc for system builders who must match changing technology to changing decision environment. This paper focuses on one such technology, namely, Decision Support System (DSS) and one such decision environment, namely, sequential decisions. It is argued that the next millennium DSS must focus on the 'D' of DSS because of the complexities of the decisions they are trying to support. These DSSs, called SDSSs, are further examined in the context of data-dialog-model-communication. Communication component is needed because of the complexity of sequential decision-making which spans across several hierarchical levels or involves several decision makers at the same level.