Decision support and decision guidance: A case study in the financial services-DSS2.0 is still far away

The provision of decision support tools for highly uncertain and unstructured decision situations has occupied researchers in the Decision Support Systems (DSS) area since the term was coined by Gorry and Scott Morton in 1971. We propose an empirical evaluation of Silver's [20] concept of decisional guidance in a case study of Big Bank, a large financial services firm. Our analysis provides evidence of the impact of decision support on the decision making of managers, in ways that are qualitatively different at the different stages of development of management thinking. The conclusions deliver fresh insights into the difficulties which even large and well equipped firms face in developing applications that support managers in their day-to-day decision making processes, let alone in their tactical and strategic reasoning. Thus, despite all the renewed hype in the DSS area, the achievement of seemingly simple decision support is still problematic.