QUESTION

1. After reviewing Managerial Support Systems, would using a decision support system in a business guarantee a better decision? What makes a good decision? Explain your answers.

2. Artificial Intelligence topics include Expert Systems, Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms. Do you think that companies can really use artificial intelligence to make a good business decision? Why or why not? Are there ethical concerns here? How about ethical concerns for gathering and using competitive intelligence?

3. Measuring Organizational Business Decisions (beginning on page 48) are critical to business. If you are working now or in the past, compare and discuss your business success metrics with those listed and described. If you have little or no work experience, identify and discuss those metrics that you think would be most critical in business.

                                                                SAMPLE SOLUTION

Decision support systems do guarantee better decision making of a business as they enhance effectiveness and efficiency. Effectiveness includes the ease with which people perform tasks and acquire information as well as measure of customers’ satisfaction rates while efficiency include performing transactions at high speed, great accuracy and minimal time. Data support systems also increase organizational control by making business transaction data available, saves costs from technological and lower infrastructure, promote a better understanding of the business and the decision making environment as well increasing decision makers’ satisfaction. A good decision is one that includes others, empowers others to act, has positive impacts on others, includes self-awareness and is accountable.

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Artificial intelligence is essential when it comes to decision making as they can be applied in various transactions or tasks. For instance, they can be used for virtual assistance especially when offering customer services. They also improve on efficiency and effectiveness of communications. Furthermore, they help generate insights as they are designed to adapt to changes in terms of performance or market behavior changes. Finally, artificial intelligence is essential as they perform automation of work which makes it easier and more accurate.  The utmost ethical concern related to artificial intelligence is unemployment as it converts manual work to automatic (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2015). Others include risks of breaching securities, effects on humanity and racist robots. Competitive intelligence may be considered ethical as it involves legally acquiring details of a competitor’s moves.

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