Using DSS for Global Competitiveness: An Effective Information-Based Decision Making Process in Public Administration

Abstract

With a changing global environment driven by the innovative evolutions of information and communication technology, organizations are setting their priorities to cater to a global marketplace. In that respect, they are focusing on adding value propositions to different data and information elements gathered to help know more about customers and various environments where products and services are manufactured and traded. Therefore organizations continuously need to increase their business intelligence by monitoring systems that analyze information and develop indicators coupled with support mechanisms to decision makers to handle semi-structured and un-structured problems characterized by varying alternatives and parameters to understand the problem spectrum and help develop alternative solutions. This chapter discusses concepts and characteristics of decision support methods and demonstrates the gap between the decision maker and the decision support systems techniques demonstrating the experience of the government of Egypt in building its information infrastructure to help develop the decision-making process both at the government level and the local public administration level.