Business flexibility from decision support systems

Globalization and competitive pressure yield increasing volatility and uncertainty for business. Firms face a variety of risks - legal, environmental, and competitive. The mechanisms employed to deal with such risks are usually concerned with strategy and planning, however another way is to ensure flexibility. This paper briefly reviews the background to the increasing need to manage business risk. Information systems can be a means for risk management by enabling organisations to be flexible. While there is some discussion of IT as allowing flexibility, there is no investigation of the role of specific technologies such as decision support systems (DSS). Using a variety of examples, this contribution argues that DSS may be an enabler of flexibility, and hence a tool for business risk management. The paper investigates the role of DSS in enabling time, range, intention and focus flexibility and in the metrics that contribute to these elements, namely efficiency, responsiveness, versatility and robustness. It demonstrates that DSS enable some of them, but are poor at supporting others.