Understanding Decision-Making in Data Warehousing and Related Decision Support Systems: An Explanatory Study of a Customer Relationship Management Application

Abstract

Many businesses have made or are making significant investments in data warehouses that reportedly support a myriad of decision support systems (DSS). Due to the newness of data warehousing and related DSS (DW-DSS), the nature of the decision support provided to DW-DSS users and the related impact on decision performance have not been investigated in an applied setting. An explanatory case study was undertaken at a financial services organization that implemented a particular type of DW-DSS, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The DSS-decision performance model has provided some theoretical guidance for this exploration. The case study results show that the decision-making support provided by these systems is limited and that an extended version of the DSS-decision performance model may better describe the factors that influence individual decision-making performance.