Decision support and Datawarehouse systems

Decision Support and Data Warehouse Systems is intended as a textbook for a one-semester course in decision support systems (DSS), with data warehousing playing the same starring role in the course as it does in today's decision support picture. With the addition of enrichment material in data warehousing, much of which can be found on the Web, it also fits a quarter system: the DSS portion of the book fits one quarter, and the data warehousing portion can easily be expanded to fill another. The book suits these environments:

• Management (business administration) programs, at the advanced undergraduate or master's level.
  
• Programs in computers and information systems (CIS) or in application-oriented computer science programs, typically at the advanced undergraduate level. (My own DSS courses, while offered in our College of Management, attract computer science majors as well.)
  
• Workshops for practicing professionals who need a grasp of this important area of technology.
  

I wrote this book for the same reason that most authors write textbooks: I had taught the subject for several semesters and was not satisfied with any of the available texts. It is meant to offer several advantages over its alternatives.

• It has a realistic objective: to help the student understand decision support systems, not to create an experienced professional.
  
• It was written as a unified whole in which each chapter relates its content to what went before and is, in turn, related to what will follow.
  
• As a result, topics are reinforced by continued use rather than being touched upon and subsequently forgotten.
  
• It gets away from the conventional wisdom, often repeated in textbook after textbook, long after actual practice has left it in the dust, to reflect how the real world works.
  
• It focuses throughout, not just on how things are, but on why they are that way. It does not present facts or research results without explanation and context.
  
• Along the same lines, it does not attempt to provide exhaustive coverage of every fact or research result that exists. It focuses on what is (in the author's opinion) important.
  
• It makes realistic assumptions about what students have already studied. It neither presumes they remember every nuance of their introductory IS course nor insults them by assuming they never saw the subject.
  
• It offers many accessible, offers nontechnical (even homey) examples of difficult concepts.
  
• It includes a running case that enables the students to apply the concepts in the chapters to a familiar situation.
  

A learning tool for the twenty-first century must be more than well planned, though. It must be current. No technology is changing the world as quickly as information technology. The decision support field is no exception to this general truth. A book that is not up-to-date, a book that merely gives the content of the 1980s a new look, will not serve its students well. The content of this book is as current as possible.

• The technology is up-to-date throughout. This is most evident in Chapter 5, where hardware issues are covered, but shows up in most other areas as well.
  
• The Web pervades this book as much as if pervades our world. It is discussed explicitly as a DSS platform. In the data warehousing arena, WOLAP is covered with examples.
  
• The last third of the book is devoted totally to the new and vital area of data warehousing. Nobody can claim to understand DSS today without having studied this key topic in depth. This section covers the approaches in use today, arranging them. so the student can understand how they relate to each other and enabling the reader to sort through competing vendor claims.
  
• Material on expert systems, long a staple of DSS texts, bas been cut back to one chapter.