Special issue: business decision support systems

Enterprize risk management has been recognized as being one of the most important issues in business management (Olson and Wu, 2008a, b, 2010). The sustainability of a business is enhanced by an ability to manage the enterprize risk that it faces, and this highlights the need for sound business decision making in complex contexts, and with imperfect information. Decision support systems (DSSs) are information systems able to support decision-making activities by enhancing a decision maker’s ability to extract useful information from the raw data that they work with. Given the importance of sound decision making, there are obvious applications of DSSs to assist in the management of enterprize risk. This combination leads to the class of Business DSSs. This special issue presents leading research in four business decision support fields: product design and life cycle management, banking, business system reliability analysis and performance evaluation. The papers present diverse views of research, and analytic models which support decisions in many areas of business. Each paper demonstrates how operations research tools of various sorts can be applied in the broad context of business decision support.