Discuss the objectives and process of computer aided decision support system.

A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance. Decision support systems can be either fully computerized, human or a combination of both. 

DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, and personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present includes:

· inventories of information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),

· comparative sales figures between one period and the next,

· projected revenue figures based on product sales assumptions.

Decision support systems help people to be more consistent with their decision making. People are naturally subjective and may change their decisions based on all kinds of irrelevant criteria such as their personal mood the people affected by the decision etc.

These systems help to implement a formal method (such as a balanced score card) to take input data and produce a consistent and impartial decision that stands up to scrutiny. Finally where it is impractical for a human to process all of the input data a decision support system can analyse the data and produce summary data and provide recommendations. However, ultimately the person can choose to override the computer's analysis - otherwise the system would be entirely automated.