Ids Dicision-Support Technology

IDS – Discussion

1. What kinds of decisions do you encounter in your profession that would benefit from decision-support technology? What kinds of DSS would be appropriate?

I think that decision-support technology is critical to your business, Julie. At a large trading firm such as yours at the Ameritrade, the turnover in employees is substantial. New employees are constantly being trained and occasionally they are eventually promoted to being traders, and traders are occasionally demoted or let go if they are not performing up to expectations. I think that decision-support technology will be a vital asset to the decision making process when management is evaluating the trainees to see if they are progressing in their knowledge and performance. The DSS’s accumulation of statistics will show management if the trainees are successful in trading overnight by showing how many trades they have made, how much money they are up or down, what markets they are successful or unsuccessful in, and many other helpful categories of statistics.

The DSS will also help evaluate the traders and how successful or unsuccessful they have been in those same categories. This will help management understand not only which traders are profitable, but also which markets the firm should be focusing on. According to an article from the New York Times, a study was done following routine decisions that managers make, and researchers were convinced that computer models, by and large, can do a better job than biased humans can. This was found especially in the financial world or any area where money is involved because when money is involved, people become emotional. Computers take the emotional aspect out of the decision making process and only the facts are accounted for.

3. What economic or other forces in the global business environment might we expect to impact our company’s global supply chain in the near future?

Julie, according to a textbook that I had in college, “In today’s...