Emerging Data Management Tools and Their Implications for Decision Support

Recently, we have witnessed a host of emerging tools in the management support systems (MSS) area including the data warehouse/multidimensinal databases (MDDB), data mining, on-line analytical processing (OLAP), intelligent agents, World Wide Web(WWW) technologies, the Internet, and corporate intranets. These tools are reshaping MSS developments in organizations. This article reviews a set of emerging data management technologies in the knowledge discovery in databases(KDD) process and analyzes their implications for decision support. Furthermore, today's MSS are equipped with a plethora of AI techniques (artifical neural networks, and genetic algorithms, etc) fuzzy sets, modeling by example , geographical information system(GIS), logic modeling, and visual interactive modeling (VIM) , All these developments suggest that we are shifting the corporate decision making paradigm form information-driven decision making in the1980s to knowledge-driven decision making in the 1990s.