Decision support system

• Decision support system

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 (usually mid and higher management) and help to make decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance (Unstructured and Semi-Structured decision problems). Decision support systems can be either fully computerized, human or a combination of both.

Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present includes:

    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 assumptions
   
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_support_system