Compliance through Automation: Decision Support Systems – Part I

Control systems can be categorized as being either decision systems or technical systems. Nonetheless, decision-making process assistance may be contained in an IT decision support system (DSS). Classically, a DSS represents an information system, or analytic model, designed to aid managers and professionals in effective decision-making processes. Interpretively, a technology-based information system represents an architectural component that collects data, processes transactions, and communicates operational results, while an analytical model is a set of relationships — with a continuum of: complexity from one variable to many, uncertainty from deterministic to probabilistic, time from static to dynamic. Thus, through proper system or model construction, an entity-centric compliance DSS can enable evaluating alternative courses of actions and efficiently choosing from among the presented options to achieve the defined objective.