Abstract:

The Decision Support Systems (DSS) are more present than ever on today market and when speaking about offering support for executives, they are usually referred as Business Intelligence (BI) tools and applications, often parts of bigger systems such as ERPs. In order to serve strategic decisions they must be primarily based on historical data sources as data warehouses or spreadsheet pivot tables and they should easily interact with other specialized systems. As far as the user interface (UI) is concerned, the Strategic DSSs must provide various user-friendly ways to input/import data and setup the usage scenario but above all they should offer many new reporting facilities, especially nowadays when there is a tendency to benefit a lot from many types of insightful alerts and key performance indicators, which are available almost in real time on portal dashboards or in complex spreadsheet-like reports no matter the costs. They can even provide complex reports based on graphs mixed with other representation forms within a geographical context, usually called carto(dia)grams. The paper also introduces a Strategic DSS example that respects many of the previously mentioned advises. The approach also shows how to design a useful Graphical UI for this DSS and resumes the effects of some particular functionalities, modules and interactions based on different technologies. The examples are meant to enrich the theoretical arguments and to complete the understanding of the whole.