DDS Systems

Tech strong business these days are coming up with a ton of ways to help increase productivity.  The company I currently work for, employs system administrators and programs who are so advanced they have personally designed and implemented a decisions support system to aid in day to day troubleshooting of our servers.  A decision support system (DSS) is a computer system used to provide support rather than complete automation of the decision making process. Supporting a decision means helping people in groups to gather intelligence, generate alternatives and make decisions. [1] In our company the DSS comes in the form of a “bot” that responds to queries and notifies us if issues through an instant message.  Based on past situations and our internal wiki, our DSS is able to supply us with a fast and helpful way to tackle an issue.  As an example, we might say to the “bot” that server 147 is overloaded with outgoing data.  Our “bot”, would then suggest piping some of that data through servers 146 and 147 to reduce the chance of future overloads.

While we are able to view the internal wiki ourselves, the bot dss is able to review the situation faster and give us a response that will help us prevent another situation from forming because it is able to analyzie the situation and see incidents that can occur from implementing certain fixes. Our DSS gives us a comparative advantage over their (our) competitors, allowing them (us) to make optimal choices for technological processes and their parameters [2]. When we encounter a problem, we can respond to it quickly based on our systems ability to analyze the situation.  While we are able to get back up and running in minutes our competitors that have inferior support systems are left behind.

One must recognize though that just because a decision support system is in place, it doesn’t mean that a problem is instantly fixed. A DSS cannot completely overcome the ability and attitude limitations of the person who is using it.[3]  In other words, a DSS is in place to give the user an option based on critical data.  Ultimately, the final say rests solely on the user. A task specific Decision Support System is intended to increase the quality and effectiveness of a specific decision or decisions. A well-designed DSS has the potential to assist those decisions makers who can and do use it. [3] The end-user needs to have the ability to understand the scenario and know how to properly handle it.  One must keep in mind that the DSS is a business tool and not a crutch.

 [1] http://www.bukisa.com/articles/472278_the-rle-of-a-decision-support-system-40dss41#ixzz1TbpVAPUk
[2] http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/abstracts/dss.html
[3] http://dssresources.com/faq/index.php?action=artikel&id=16