Analysing the true contribution of decision support tools to decision making-case studies in irish organisations

There is abundant evidence that the current business environment is pushing firms to invest increasing amounts of resources in sourcing state of the art IT capability. Some of this investment is directed towards developing the decision support capability of the firm and it is important to measure the extent to which this deployment of decision support is having a positive impact on the decision making of managers. Using existing theories, namely an adaptation of Humphreys' representation levels (Humphreys, 1989), to classify the type of support which managers can get from their decision support tools, we investigated the portfolio of decision related applications available to managers in 5 Irish firms. Our findings indicate that not all firms can achieve the development of decision support tools across all the categories of the framework. Managers need to be able to spell out the problems they are facing, but also need to be in a situation where they have clear incentives to make the efforts required in investigating high level problems, before firms can be observed to have a complete portfolio of decision support tools, not merely a collection of static reporting tools.