Decision support in the future tense

This special issue is composed of a set of articles whose earlier version appeared in the 1995 Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Decision Support Systems, Hong Kong. The selected articles share a common thread. They discuss concepts and issues related to the development and deployment of decision support technology in the context of heterogeneous, network-wide distributed environments. At the risk of dating ourselves, we name the theme of this issue: “Decision Support in the Future Tense”. Indeed, the overwhelming success of the Internet has recently opened uncharted opportunities for organizations, large and small, to use that technology as a means to explore the new frontiers of electronic commerce. And more recently, while the Internet is still grabbing most of the headlines in information technology, another revolution has taken place inside corporations. Intranets private and internal Intemets shielded from the external world by “firewalls” have quickly become a means for companies to streamline their internal communications and enhance their productivity. The explosive growth of the Inter-/Intranets and the World Wide Web (WWW) has, however, been primarily focused on information exchange among different organizational units using data exchange protocols and Workgroup technology. Organizations