DISTRIBUTED DECISION-SUPPORT AND ORGANIZATIONAL CONNECTIVITY - A CASE-STUDY

While the Internet has been grabbing most of the attention of the info rmation systems researchers and practitioners, online transaction proc essing systems still take the lion's share of business information sys tems. Although many Decision Support Systems (DSS) have been developed , they failed to become mainstream products due to their Limited avail ability, applicability, and interoperability. In this paper, we propos e a script language to make use of the vast resource of the Internet a s a means (i) to better make DSS known to potential users, and (ii) to allow construction of DSS from DSS components stored on various Inter net sites. With the proposed script language, we contend that DSS woul d have a greater potential of gaining a larger share of use among the business community. Contrasting to other approaches that advocate for a central clearinghouse of DSS components, we propose a bottom-up stra tegy, i.e., users and developers of DSS's cooperate in weaving a web o f distributed DSS components to form a federated network of on-line DS S repositories. The purpose of the proposed script language is to ensu re effective search of DSS components and rapid development and deploy ment of application-specific DSS. The proposed method is scalable to s upport distributed platforms using multiple processors and/or applicat ion domains. A case study derived from a real life application in a mu lti-national company is discussed to illustrate the proposed approach.