A decision support system (DSS) is a computer-based information system that supports business or organizational decision-making activities. DSSs serve the management, operations, and planning levels of an organization and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance.
DSSs include knowledge-based systems. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.
Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present are:
inventories of information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),
comparative sales figures between one period and the next,
projected revenue figures based on product sales assumption