Foundations and Technologies for Decision Making - Report

This report provides a detailed overview of decision-making, starting with its definition and the 8-step process. It differentiates between programmed and non-programmed decisions and explores Simon's four phases of decision-making: intelligence, design, choice, and implementation. The report also discusses the role of technology in supporting decision-making, including the capabilities of Decision Support Systems (DSS), Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), Expert Systems, Genetic algorithms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Neutral Networks. It further classifies DSS into various types, such as document-driven, communication-driven, knowledge-driven, data-driven, and model-driven systems, while also addressing the limitations of DSS, such as difficulties in data quantification, system design failures, and information overload. The report concludes with a list of references.

Foundations and
Technologies for
Decision making
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What is decision making?
 Decision refers to the choice made from two or more alternatives
 Decision making is the process by means of which the managers
can address the threats and opportunities by means of analysing the
options and making the decisions regarding the objectives and
courses of action (Smith and Winterhalder 2017).
 It is a set of 8 steps that comprise of the process of identification of
a problem, choosing an alternative and making evaluation of the
effectiveness of the decisions.

Foundation- The 8-step of
decision making process
Identification of
the problem
Identification of
the decision
making criteria
Allocating the
weights to the
criteria
Developing
alternatives
Analysing the
alternatives
Choosing an
alternative
Implementation
of the
alternative
Evaluation of
decision
effectiveness

Types of Decision making
 Programmed decisions
 It is an automatic process
 The managers need to make decisions many times before the final outcome.
 There are several rules and guidelines to be followed (Albadan et al., 2018)
 Non-programmed decisions
 There are no rules as the decision is new
 These decisions are taken in unusual situations that are not addressed.
 Decisions are based upon information and the intuition of the managers and
their judgement.

Simon’s four phases of decision
making

Phase 1: Intelligence phase
 In this phase, the issue is identified and the information regarding
the issue are collected.
It is a very long process because the decision that is to be made
comes from the details and information
This phase involve the comparison of current status of the projects
and processes with their plan (Aithal and Kumar 2017)
 The outcome or the end result of this stage is the decision
statement.

Phase 2: Design phase
 This phase develops many solutions for a particular problem
It involves a good deal of research into the present options.
Predicting and measuring the outcomes.

Phase 3: Choice phase
 At this phase, one can evaluate the present options that are
developed in the deign phase and select one among them.
 The result of this stage is the decision that one can be carry out.
 Planning for the implementation are done.

Phase 4: Implementation
 AT this stage, the decision is actually carried out
Design, choice and intelligence that have been made would be
implemented in this phase.

Roles of Technology in decision
making
 Date Processing Capabilities
Bringing in speed
Supporting group decision making (Saaty 2016)

Systems provided by technology
to make decisions
 Decision Support System (DSS)
 Geographical Information System (GIS)
 Group Decision Support System (GDSS)
 Expert Systems
 Genetic algorithm
 Expert Systems
 Artificial Intelligence (AI)
 Neutral Network

Decision Support System (DSS)
and its classification
 Document-driven DSS (Examples- web pages)
 Communication-driven DSS (Example- chats and instant messaging
softwares)
 Knowledge-driven DSS (Example- business consumers)
 Data-driven DSS- (Example- computer-based databases)
 Model-driven DSS (example- used by the staff managers and
managers) (Hasan et al. 2017)