Experiences in Building and Using Decision-Support Systems in Postgraduate University Courses

Abstract

Introduction The concept of Decision Support Systems (DSS) has been around since the late 1960s (Power, 2003) and in recent years these systems have become increasingly important in business. As would be expected, a great deal has been written about Decision Support Systems--a Google search in February 2007 revealed over 242,000,000 pages of information, and a great deal of support material is also available. Unfortunately, for our purposes not much of this material is particularly useful. Our interest is in introducing the basic concepts of Decision Support Systems in two postgraduate subjects that are part of business Masters' programs at Victoria University in Melbourne. These are not subjects about Decision Support Systems, but Information Systems subjects that introduce, amongst other things, concepts of decision support. Many of our students are general business students who have little background in computing or information systems. What we need is thus a 'light' treatment of this topic, preferably with some concrete examples that the students can view, manipulate and customise. In this paper we will relate our experiences in building and using such simple Decision Support Systems. In the subject Executive and Mobile Computing we also introduce the concept of an Executive Information System (EIS), which Power (2003) notes evolved from relational database products and model-driven Decision Support Systems. In the subject Small Business Internet and Information Systems we introduce the DSS within the framework of investigating only such systems that are suitable for and affordable to small business. We make use of a simple programming language, available within Microsoft Office to do this. Although there are many teaching resources available for Decision Support Systems (such as, Holsapple and Whinston (2005), Power and Kaparthi (2002) and Monash University (2005)), for our subjects we have encountered three significant problems in sourcing suitable DSS examples: 1) Difficulty in learning to use the DSS--many of the available systems are too complex for our students to learn and use successfully within the short time that we have available. This is, of course, counter-intuitive to the notion that DSS are meant to be easy for managers to use. 2) Inability to examine the logic of the system: a) A business that uses a DSS will want this to be transparent in its operation, but in teaching about DSS we want the students to be able to see and understand how the system operates. It is difficult to understand what is going on unless you can understand the logic behind decisions recommended by the system. b) Need to customise--we would like students to be able not just to see how the system works, but to be able to alter assumptions, to customise it, to make changes and to observe their affect. 3) Cost--with a small budget available to support the purchase of software for teaching purposes we need a system that is free, or at least inexpensive. The way we have attempted to solve these problems is to build our own simple systems for use by the students. To do this we have made use of Microsoft Office (especially Excel), Visual Basic (VB) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). In the future we will probably make use also of the facilities available in VB.Net. Although others have reported on use of VBA and Excel for building decision support systems by students (Palocsay & Markham, 2002; Ragsdale, 2001), most of these are typically working with students majoring in some form of computing rather than with general business students. The remainder of this paper will describe how we have attempted to solve this problem with our students, and discuss some of the consequences. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Decision Support Systems Based on a Spreadsheet The goal of Executive and Mobile Computing is, as its name suggests, simply to examine how business executives can benefit from the use of computing (and especially mobile computing) technologies. …