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40 Part I • Decision Making and Analytics: An Overview

developments have clearly contributed to facilitating growth of decision support and
analytics in a number of ways, including the following:

• Group communication and collaboration. Many decisions are made today by
groups whose members may be in different locations. Groups can collaborate and
communicate readily by using Web-based tools as well as the ubiquitous smartphones.
Collaboration is especially important along the supply chain, where partners—all the
way from vendors to customers—must share information. Assembling a group of
decision makers, especially experts, in one place can be costly. Information systems
can improve the collaboration process of a group and enable its members to be at dif-
ferent locations (saving travel costs). We will study some applications in Chapter 12.
• Improved data management. Many decisions involve complex computations.
Data for these can be stored in different databases anywhere in the organization
and even possibly at Web sites outside the organization. The data may include text,
sound, graphics, and video, and they can be in different languages. It may be neces-
sary to transmit data quickly from distant locations. Systems today can search, store,
and transmit needed data quickly, economically, securely, and transparently.
• Managing giant data warehouses and Big Data. Large data warehouses, like
the ones operated by Walmart, contain terabytes and even petabytes of data. Special
methods, including parallel computing, are available to organize, search, and mine
the data. The costs related to data warehousing are declining. Technologies that fall
under the broad category of Big Data have enabled massive data coming from a
variety of sources and in many different forms, which allows a very different view
into organizational performance that was not possible in the past.
• Analytical support. With more data and analysis technologies, more alterna-
tives can be evaluated, forecasts can be improved, risk analysis can be performed
quickly, and the views of experts (some of whom may be in remote locations) can
be collected quickly and at a reduced cost. Expertise can even be derived directly
from analytical systems. With such tools, decision makers can perform complex
simulations, check many possible scenarios, and assess diverse impacts quickly and
economically. This, of course, is the focus of several chapters in the book.
• Overcoming cognitive limits in processing and storing information. According
to Simon (1977), the human mind has only a limited ability to process and store infor-
mation. People sometimes find it difficult to recall and use information in an error-free
fashion due to their cognitive limits. The term cognitive limits indicates that an indi-
vidual’s problem-solving capability is limited when a wide range of diverse information
and knowledge is required. Computerized systems enable people to overcome their
cognitive limits by quickly accessing and processing vast amounts of stored information
(see Chapter 2).
• Knowledge management. Organizations have gathered vast stores of informa-
tion about their own operations, customers, internal procedures, employee interac-
tions, and so forth through the unstructured and structured communications taking
place among the various stakeholders. Knowledge management systems (KMS,
Chapter 12) have become sources of formal and informal support for decision
making to managers, although sometimes they may not even be called KMS.
• Anywhere, any time support. Using wireless technology, managers can access
information anytime and from any place, analyze and interpret it, and communicate
with those involved. This perhaps is the biggest change that has occurred in the last
few years. The speed at which information needs to be processed and converted
into decisions has truly changed expectations for both consumers and businesses.
These and other capabilities have been driving the use of computerized decision support
since the late 1960s, but especially since the mid-1990s. The growth of mobile technologies,

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