Decision Support Components on the Internet

Operational software like online transaction processing systems still take the lion’s share of business information systems. Though many Decision Support Systems (DSS) were developed, they failed to become mainstream products. The reason is lack of knowledge of availability, applicability, and interoperability. In this paper, we propose to exploit the vast resource of the Internet to give DSS a second chance. Contrasting to other approaches, our strategy is bottom-up, i.e., users and developers of DSS’s cooperate in weaving a web of distributed DSS components. Repositories serve for ensuring application-centered consistency and for searching. The method is scaleable in number of processors, application domains, and platforms. A script language for combining DSS components is introduced based on observations from a real life example of a multi-national company. 1 Most of the work reported here was done while the authors were with the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, Department of Information and Systems Management, Clear Water Bay Rd., KLN., Hong Kong.