Empirically assessing factors related to DSS benefits

This paper reports the results of a field study surveying 201 U.S. business managers to test the relationship between decision support systems (DSS) benefits and a list of factors expected to affect them. DSS benefits considered are: decision quality, competitive edge, improved communication, cost reduction, increased productivity, time savings, overall satisfaction, overall cost effectiveness and total benefits. The determinants of DSS benefits fall into four broad categories encompassing attributes of the industry (strategic position and degree of competition), the organization (size of organization, task structuredness, frequency of use, quality of training, organization support and vendor support), the DSS (timeliness of output, completeness of output, accuracy of output, relevance of output, flexibility, range of alternatives and user-friendliness) and of the DSS user (age of user, experience with DSS, experience on job, education level, attitude of user and expectations of user). Correlation coefficients and incremental R square measures (stepwise regression) show that much of the variance (52-84%) in each of the benefits can be explained by the factors included in the study. Based on the results, managerial recommendations on how to proceed to increase DSS benefits are presented.