Topic 05

MANAGERIAL & DECISION SUPPORT

SYSTEMS

BMIT5103 Course
Information Technology for Managers

Dr. Huy Nguyen

BMIT5103 John von Neumann Institute - Vietnam National University

Information Ho Chi Minh
Technology City
for Managers
BMIT5103

STUDY GUIDE
TOPIC 05
“Managerial & Decision Support Systems”

• Learning outcomes:
1. Describe the different types of knowledge;
2. Explain the approaches to knowledge management;
3. Discuss the technologies that can be utilised in the knowledge
management system;
4. Describe the drivers for business intelligence initiatives and the
benefits;
5. Explain the data visualisation, geographical information systems and
virtual reality;
6. Describe decision support and their benefits;
7. Describe artificial intelligence and expert system.

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STUDY GUIDE
TOPIC 05
“Managerial & Decision Support Systems”
• Introduction:
- Managing knowledge:
• Provide an understanding of knowledge management, including the roles of
management and IT in the capture, distribution, and use of knowledge;
• Provide an excellent understanding of why knowledge management is important to
all sizes of businesses, explaining both the benefits and the drawbacks.
- Corporate Performance Management and Business Intelligence:
• Discuss the overview of the concepts of data management and the potential for
garnering strategic benefits from data analysis;
• Focus on business intelligence, its tools and techniques, as well as on on-line
analytical processing (OLAP) and a review on ad hoc queries;
• Different techniques for visualising or presenting data such as data visualisation,
geographical information systems (GIS), and virtual reality are discussed in relation
to decision support.
- Managerial Decision Making and IT Support Systems:
• Describe the management decision and intelligent support systems.
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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE

• Introduction to Knowledge Management

• Knowledge Management Actitivites
• Approaches to Knowledge Management
• Ensuring Success of Knowledge Management Efforts

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
INTRODUCTION TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

• Intellectual capital is the knowledge that people apply to solve

problems and make decisions in their personal and professional
lives;
• This capital is built on textbook knowledge, real world experiences,
intuition, judgment, and perception;
• Knowledge is critical to reducing costs, maintaining continuity, and
improving the organisational performance;
• Maintaining organisational knowledge was a key management factor
in retaining and promoting employees.

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
INTRODUCTION TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
• Knowledge management (KM) is a process that helps:
- Organisationals identify, select, organise, disseminate, and transfer
important information and expertise that are part of the organisational’s
memory;
- People to understand, interpret, and apply this knowledge for the
betterment of the workplace or society;
• Characteristics of knowledge:
- Very distinct from data and information;
- Extraordinary leverage and increasing returns;
- Fragmentation, leakage, and the need to refresh;
- Uncertain value and value of sharing;
- Rooted in time.
• Types of knowledge:
- Tacit (or implicit) knowledge;
- Explicit (or leaky) knowledge.
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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
INTRODUCTION TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

• Types of knowledge:
- Tacit knowledge:
• Subjective, cognitive, and experiential learning;
• Highly personal and difficult to formalise, generally slow and costly to transfer
and can be plagued by ambiguity.
- Explicit knowledge:
• Objective, rational, and technical knowledge;
• More explicit knowledge is made, more economically it can be transferred.

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
INTRODUCTION TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

• Reasons to integrate both explicit and tacit knowledge:

- Information must be managed so employees can apply it as knowledge;
- Much information is lost because it is not captured;
- Sharing knowledge creates a more powerful company;
- Valuing intellectual capital signals that the company values its people.

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
INTRODUCTION TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
• Steps in knowledge management cycle:
- Create: Knowledge is created as people
determine new ways of doing things or
develop expertise;
- Capture: New knowledge must be identified
as valuable and be presented in a
reasonable way;
- Refine: New knowledge must be placed in
context so that it is actionable;
- Store: Knowledge must be stored in a certain
format in a knowledge repository so that
others in the organisational can access it;
- Manage: Knowledge must be kept current
and must be reviewed to verify that it is
relevant and accurate;
- Disseminate: Knowledge must be made
available in useful format to anyone in the
organisational who needs it, anywhere and
any time.
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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ACTITIVITES
• Knowledge creation or knowledge acquisition is the generation of new insights, ideas, or routines
with the modes:
- Socialisation: Conversion of tacit knowledge to new tacit knowledge through social interactions and shared
experience;
- Combination: Creation of new explicit knowledge by merging, categorising, reclassifying, and synthesising
existing explicit knowledge;
- Externalisation: Converting tacit knowledge to new explicit knowledge;
- Internalisation: Creation of new tacit knowledge from explicit knowledge.
• Knowledge sharing: Exchange of ideas, insights, solutions, experiences to another individuals via
knowledge transfer computer systems or other non-IS methods;
• Knowledge seeking: Search for and use of internal organisational knowledge.

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
• Fundamental approaches to knowledge management:
- Process: Attempt to codify organisational knowledge through formalised
controls, processes, and technologies frequently using information
technologies to enhance the quality and speed of knowledge creation and
distribution;
- Practice: Assume that organisational knowledge is tacit in nature and formal
controls, processes, and technologies are not suitable for transmitting this
type of understanding;
- Best practice: Activities and methods that the most effective
organisationals use to operate and manage various functions:
• Good idea: Not yet proven, but makes intuitive sense;
• Good practice: Implemented technique, methodology, procedure, or
process that has improved business results;
• Local practice: Best approach for all or a large part of the organisational
based on analysing hard data;
• Industry best practice: Based on analysing hard data from industry.

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
APPROACHES TO KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT
• Technologies in knowledge management tools:
- Artificial Intelligence: Expert systems, neural networks, fuzzy logic,
genetic algorithms, etc.:
• Assist in identifying expertise;
• Elicit knowledge automatically and semi-automatically;
• Provide interfacing through natural language processors;
• Enable intelligent searches through intelligent agents.
- Intelligent agent: Software system that learn how users work and
provide assistance in their daily tasks;
- Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD): Process used to search
for and extract useful information from volumes of documents and data;
- Extensible Markup Language (XML): Enable standardised
representations of data structures.

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
ENSURING SUCCESS OF KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT EFFORTS
• Benefits of knowledge management strategy:
- Reduce loss of intellectual capital due to people leaving the company;
- Reduce costs by decreasing the number of times the company must
repeatedly solve the same problem;
- Reduce redundancy of knowledge-base activities;
- Increase employees satisfaction by enabling greater personal development
and empowerment;
- Gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace by constantly creating new
business knowledge into their products and services.
• Valuation of knowledge management systems is measured by:
- Asset-based approach: Start with the identification of intellectual assets and
then focus management’s attention on increasing their value;
- Balanced scorecard: Financial measures (Return on investment - ROI) are
balanced against customer, process, and innovation measures (non-financial
metrics for intangible assets).

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
ENSURING SUCCESS OF KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT EFFORTS
• Factors contribute to KM failure:
- Lack of management involvement;
- Lack of clear understanding of KM benefits;
- Lack of adequate staff and resources;
- Overambitious scope for the KM effort;
- Employees often prefer face-to-face conversation over technology;
- Organisational implements KM in an effort to imitate the competition without
really grasping all the cultural changes that a KM system will introduce.

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MANAGING KNOWLEDGE
ENSURING SUCCESS OF KNOWLEDGE
MANAGEMENT EFFORTS
• Important success factors:
- Management involvement and priorities, maintain seniors management support;
- Link to a firm’s economic value to demonstrate financial viability and maintain
executive sponsorship;
- User education and training, knowledge-friendly and sharing culture with
nontrivial motivational methods such as rewards and recognition, and a clear
purpose and language to encourage users to contribute and use knowledge;
- Adequate technical and non-technical infrastructure, and deployment of KM system;
- Having effective influence in terms of coordination, control and measurement,
change in motivational practises, project management and leadership;
- Having key resources such as financial resources and cross functional expertise;
- Taking advantage of technological opportunities;
- Multiple channels for knowledge transfer, and a standard, flexible knowledge
structure and a level of process orientation to match the way the organisational
performs works and uses knowledge.
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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

& BUSINESS INTELLIGENT

• Framework for Business Intelligence: Concepts & Benefits

• Business Analytics, Online Analytical Processing, Reporting &

Querying

• Data Visualisation, Geographical Information Systems & Virtual

Reality

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CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS INTELLIGENT
FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:
CONCEPTS & BENEFITS
• Business Intelligence system:
- Broad category of applications and techniques for gathering, storing,
analysing, and providing access to data to help enterprise users make
better business and strategic decisions;
- Leveraging corporate data and transforming it into useful knowledge in
improving access and refining it to enable appropriate actions.
• Major benefits of BI:
- Provide accurate information when needed, including a real-time view of
the details of corporate performance;
- Time saving with faster, more accurate reporting;
- Single version of truth;
- Improved strategies and plans, strategic and tactical decisions;
- More efficient processes, cost savings and increased revenue;
- Improved customers and partners relationships.

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CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS INTELLIGENT
FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:
CONCEPTS & BENEFITS
• Major components of Business Intelligence:

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CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS INTELLIGENT
FRAMEWORK FOR BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE:
CONCEPTS & BENEFITS
• Reasons why BI projects fail:
- Failure to recognise BI projects as cross-functional business initiatives, and
to understand that as such they differ from typical standalone solutions;
- Unengaged or weak business sponsors;
- Unavailable or unwilling business representatives from the functional areas;
- Lack of skilled (or available) staff, or suboptimal staff utilisation;
- No software release concept (no iterative development method);
- No work breakdown structure (no methodology);
- No business analysis or standardisation activities;
- No appreciation of the negative impact of “dirty data” on business
profitability;
- No understanding of the necessity for and the use of metadata;
- Too much reliance on disparate methods and tools.

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CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS INTELLIGENT
BUSINESS ANALYTICS, ONLINE ANALYTICAL
PROCESSING, REPORTING & QUERYING
• Categories of business analytics:

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CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS INTELLIGENT
DATA VISUALISATION, GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
SYSTEMS & VIRTUAL REALITY
• Data visualisation:
- Technologies that support visualising and sometimes interpretating data;
- Help users interactively sort, subdivide, combine, and organise data while it
is in its graphical form including images, geographical information systems
(GIS), graphical user interface (GUI), graphs, virtual reality, dimensional
presentations, videos, and animation.
• Geographical information system (GIS): Computer-based system for capturing,
storing, checking, integrating, manipulating, and displaying data using digitised
maps;
• Virtual reality (VR): Interactive, computer-generated, 3D dimensional graphics
delivered to the user through a head-mounted display;
• Dashboard: Provide tabular and graphical views of various reports including
comparisons to metrics;
• Scorecard: Provide visual presentation of reports by providing tabular and
graphical views of various reports.

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CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT & BUSINESS INTELLIGENT
DATA VISUALISATION, GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
SYSTEMS & VIRTUAL REALITY
• Balanced scorecard:

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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT

SUPPORT SYSTEMS

• Managers & Decision Making

• Decision Support Systems: For Individuals, Groups & Enterprise

• Intelligent Support Systems & Expert Systems

• Other Intelligent Systems

• Automated Decision Support

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
MANAGERS & DECISION MAKING
• Management: Process that helps to archieve organisational goals (outputs)
through the use of corporate resources (inputs);
• Organisational decision: Made by managers and refer to a choice made
between two or more alternatives in order to:
- Problem solving & opportunity exploitation.
• Reasons why managers need the support of IT:
- Number of alternatives to be considered is increasing due to innovations in
technology, improved communication, the development of global markets, and the
use of Internet & e-business;
- Many decisions are made under time pressure;
- Due to uncertainty in the decision environment, it is frequently necessary to
conduct a sophisticated analysis;
- Decision makers can be in different locations and so is the information;
- Decision making frequently requires an organisational to conduct a forecast of
prices, market share, and so on;
- Data are located in multiple sources and need to be integrated from those sources.
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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
MANAGERS & DECISION MAKING

• Some of the MSS tools used for decision making:

- Decision Support Systems (DSS): Provide support primarily to analytical,
quantitative types of decisions;
- Executive (Enterprise) Support Systems (ESS): Support the
informational roles of executives;
- Group Decision Support Systems: Support managers and staff working
in groups;
- Intelligent Systems: Capable of reasoning, learning and problem solving,
thus help in managerial decision making.

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
MANAGERS & DECISION MAKING
• Management support systems for decision making:

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
MANAGERS & DECISION MAKING
• Process and phases in decision making/modelling:

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
MANAGERS & DECISION MAKING

• Model (in decision making): Simplified representation of reality;

• Benefits of modeling in decision making:
- Cost of virtual experimentation is much lower than the cost of
experimentation with a real system;
- Models allow for the simulated compression of time;
- Manipulating the model is much easier than manipulating the real system;
- The costs of mistakes are much lower in virtual experimentation;
- Modeling allows a manager to better deal with the uncertainty by
introducing “what-if” and calculating the risks involved in specific actions;
- Mathematical models allow the analysis and comparison of a very large
number of possible alternative solutions;
- Models enhance and reinforce learning and support training.

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
MANAGERS & DECISION MAKING
• Groups of model according to their degree of abstraction:
- Iconic or scale model: Physical replica of a system;
- Analog model: Do not look like the real system but behave like it;
- Mathematical (quantitative) model: Describe the system with the aid of
mathematics and is composed of three types of variables (decision,
uncontrollable and result);
- Mental model: Provide a subjective description of how a person thinks about
a situation, include beliefs, assumptions, relationships and flows of work as
perceived by that individual.

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: FOR
INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS & ENTERPRISE
• Decision support system (DSS): Computer-based information system that
combines models and data in an attempt to solve semistructured and some
unstructured problems with intensive user involvement;
• Reasons for the increasing use of DSSs:
- New and accurate information is needed;
- Information was needed fast;
- Tracking the company’s numerous business operations was increasingly difficult;
- The company was operating in an unstable economy;
- Company faced increasing foreign and domestic competition;
- The company’s existing computer system did not properly support the objectives
of increasingly efficiency, profitability, and entry into profitable markets;
- The IS department are unable to address the diversity of the company’s needs or
management’s ad hoc inquiries;
- The business analyst function is not inherent within the existing systems.
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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: FOR
INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS & ENTERPRISE
• Capabilities of DSS:
- Provide support for decision makers at all managerial levels, whether individuals or
groups, mainly in semistructured and unstructured situations, by bringing together
human judgment and objective information;
- Support several interdependent and/or sequential decisions;
- Support all phases of decision making process as well as a variety of decision
making processes and styles;
- Adaptable by the user over time to deal with changing conditions;
- Easy to construct and use in many cases;
- Promote learning, which leads to new demands and refinement of the current
application, which leads to additional learning, and so forth;
- Usually utilize quantitative models;
- Equipped with a knowledge management component that allows the efficient and
effective solution of very complex problems;
- Dissminated for use via the web;
- Allow the easy execution of sensitivity analysis.
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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: FOR
INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS & ENTERPRISE
• DSSs employ mathematical models such as sensitivity analysis;
• Sensitivity analysis:
- Study the impact that changes in one (or more) parts of a model have on
other parts;
- Types of sensitivity analysis:
• What-if analysis: Study the impact of a change in the assumptions (input data)
on the proposed solution;
• Goal-seeking analysis: Study the value of the inputs necessary to achieve a
desired level of output.

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: FOR
INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS & ENTERPRISE
• Components of DSS:
- DSS data management subsystem contains all the data that flow from
several sources, and are extracted prior to their entry into a DSS database
or a data warehouse;
- Model management subsystem contains completed models (financial,
statistical, management science, or other quantitative models), and the
routines to develop DSSs applications;
- User interface covers all aspects of the communications between a user
and the DSS;
- Users are the person (manager, or the decision maker) faced with the
problem or decision that the DSS is designed to support;
- Knowledge-based or intelligent subsystem provides the expertise for
solving some aspects of the problem, or the knowledge that can enhance
the operation of the other DSS components.

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: FOR
INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS & ENTERPRISE

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: FOR
INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS & ENTERPRISE
• Group Decision Support System (GDSS): Support a group linked by LAN rather than
an individual;
• Organisational Decision Support System (ODSS): Focus on an organisational task
or activity involving a sequence of operations and decision makers and provide the
following:
- It affects several organisational units or corporate problems;
- It cuts across organisational functions or hierarchical layers;
- It involves computer-based and (usually) communications technologies.
• Executive Information System (EIS) or Executive Support System (ESS):
- Rapid access to timely information;
- Direct access to management reports;
- Very user friendly and supported by graphics;
- Exception reporting - reporting of only the results that deviate from a set of standards;
- Drill down reporting - investigating information in increasing detail;
- Easily connected within online information services and e-mail;
- Include analysis support, communications, office automation and intelligence support.
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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
INTELLIGENT SUPPORT SYSTEMS & EXPERT SYSTEMS
• Intelligent system:
- Describe the various commercial applications of artificial intelligence (AI);
- Simulate computer functions normally associated with human intelligence,
such as reasoning, learning, and problem solving.
• AI applications:
- Make computers easier to use;
- Make knowledge more widely available;
- Significantly increase the speed and consistency of some problem solving
procedures;
- Handle problems that are difficult to solve by conventional computing and
those that have incomplete or unclear data;
- Increase the productivity of performing many tasks;
- Help in handling information overload by summarising or interpreting
information;
- Assist in searching through large amounts of data.
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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
INTELLIGENT SUPPORT SYSTEMS & EXPERT SYSTEMS
• Commercial AI techniques:
- Expert system: Computerised advisory systems usually based on rules;
- Natural language processing (NLP): Enable computers to recognise and even understand
human languages;
- Speech understanding: Enable computers to recognise words and understand short voice sentences;
- Robotic and sensory system: Programmable combination of mechanical and computer
programs to recognise their environments via sensors;
- Computer vision and scene recognition: Enable computers to interpret the content of
pictures captured by cameras;
- Machine learning: Enable computers to interpret the content of data and information captured
by sensors;
- Handwriting recognition: Enable computers to recognise characters (letters and digits) written by hand;
- Neural computing networks: Using massive parllel processing, able to recognise patterns in
large amount of data;
- Fuzzy logic: Enables computers to reason with partial information;
- Intelligent agents: Software programs that perform tasks for human or machine master;
- Semantic web: Intelligent software program that understands content of web pages;
- Genetic programming: Automatic analysis and synthesis of computer programs.
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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
INTELLIGENT SUPPORT SYSTEMS & EXPERT SYSTEMS
• Activities to transfer the expertise from an expert to a computer:
- Knowledge acquisition: From experts or other sources to systems;
- Knowledge representation: Organised as rules or frames in the computer;
- Knowledge inferencing: Performed in a component called the inference engine of the
ES and results in the recommendation;
- Knowledge transfer to the user: From experts to users.
• Benefits of ES:
- Increased output, productivity and quality;
- Capture and dissemination of scarce expertise;
- Operation in hazardous environments;
- Accessibility to knowledge and help desks;
- Reliability;
- Ability to work with incomplete or uncertain information;
- Provision of training;
- Enhancement of decision- making and problem-solving capabilities;
- Decreased decision-making time and reduce downtime.

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
OTHER INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

• Natural language processing and voice technologies:

- Natural language processing (NLP);
- Natural language understanding/speech (voice) recognition;
- Natural language generation/voice synthesis.
• Artificial neural networks (ANNs):
- System of programs and data structures that approximates the operation of
the human brain;
- Particularly good at recognising subtle, hidden, and newly emerging
patterns within complex data as well as interpreting incomplete inputs.
• Fuzzy logic represents a small, but serious application of AI in business;
• Simulation generally refers to a technique for conducting experiments
(such as “what-if”) with a computer on a model of a management
system.

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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
AUTOMATED DECISION SUPPORT
• Automated Decision Support (ADS):
- Known as Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) systems;
- Rule-based systems that automatically provide solutions to repetitive
managerial problems.
• Enterprise Decision Management (EDM):
- Emerge as an important discipline, due to an increasing need to automate
high-volume decisions across the enterprise and to impart precision,
consistency, and agility in the decision-making process.
• Why to adopt EDM:
- Need a higher return from previous infrastructure investments;
- Face increasing business decision complexity;
- Face competitive or regulatory pressure that calls for more sophisticated
decisions;
- Must take advantage of increasingly short windows of competitive
advantage.
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MANAGERIAL DECISION MAKING & IT SUPPORT SYSTEMS
AUTOMATED DECISION SUPPORT
• EDM works by combining data, business rules and advanced predictive
analytics in powerful decision services:

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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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AGENDA

• Managing Knowledge

• Corporate Performance Management & Business Intelligent

• Managerial Decision Making & IT Support Systems

• Managerial Issues

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MANAGERIAL ISSUES

• Organisational culture change;

• How to store tacit knowledge;
• Implementation in the face of quickly changing technology;
• Why BI projects fail;
• BI and BPM today and tomorrow;
• Data security and ethics;
• Cost justification and intangible benefits.

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SUMMARY
TOPIC 05
“Managerial & Decision Support Systems”
• Knowledge management is a process that helps organisationals identify, select,
organise, disseminate, and transfer important information and expertise that typically
reside within the organisational in an unstructured way;
• Explicit (structured, leaky) knowledge deals with more objective, rational, and
technical knowledge. Tacit (unstructured, sticky) knowledge is usually in the domain
of subjective, cognitive, and experiential learning. Tacit knowledge is highly personal
and hard to formalise;
• Knowledge management requires a major transformation in organisational culture to
create a desire to share knowledge, plus commitment to KM at all levels of firm;
• Knowledge management is an effective way for an organisational to leverage its
intellectual assets;
• Knowledge management has many potential benefits resulting from reuse of
expertise. The problem is how to collect, store, update, and properly reuse the
knowledge;
• Business intelligence is driven by the need to get accurate and timely information in
an easy way, and to analyse it, sometimes in minutes, possibly by the end-users;
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SUMMARY (cont.)
TOPIC 05
“Managerial & Decision Support Systems”
• Business analytics (BA) is an umbrella name for large number of methods and tools
used to conduct data analysis;
• Data visualisation is an important business intelligence capability;
• Business intelligence can be designed to support the real-time enterprise
environment;
• Business performance management is an umbrella term covering methodologies,
metrics, processes, and systems used to drive performance of the enterprise;
• Decision making involves four major phases: intelligence, design, choice, and
implementation;
• The major component of decision support system are a database and its
management, the model base an intelligent (knowledge) component can be added;
• Expert system technology attempts to transfer knowledge from experts and
documented sources to the computer, in order to make knowledge available to non-
experts for the purpose of solving difficult problems;
• Automated decision support systems are routine, repetitive decisions for situations
where business rules can be applied.
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