UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS: 2017/2018
EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF BUSINESS IN
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
BBIT 209 DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS
FULL TIME/PART TIME
DATE: DECEMBER, 2017 TIME: 2 HOURS
INSTRUCTIONS: Answer Question One & ANY OTHER TWO questions.
QUESTION ONE
a) Explain the relationship between business intelligence and DSS (4Marks )
b) Identify five types of systems in the DSS hierarchy (5Marks)
c) You are about to buy a car. Follow Simons stages of decision making and describe your activities
in each step (5Marks)
d) One of the key functions of management is decision making. Using specific examples, you are required
to:
i. Describe the types of decisions that managers are required to take. (3 Marks)
ii. Describe the characteristics of decisions taken at different levels in an organisation. (2 Marks)
iii. Identify the four conditions under which a manager has to make decisions (4 Marks)
e) Define the following terms as used in DSS (4 Marks)
i) Objective Utility
ii) Goal Seeking
f) Identify three functions of modeling in DSS. (3 Marks)
QUESTION TWO
a) Distinguish between data-directed and goal-directed analysis in rule-based systems. Which is preferred
for medical diagnostic systems and why? (6 Marks)
b) Using relevant examples differentiate between the following decision theories :descriptive,
prescriptive and normative (9 Marks)
c) Describe five types of systems in the DSS hierarchy (5Marks)
QUESTION THREE
a) Identify and assess the integration of multiple techniques in DSS development tools. (7 Marks)
b) Outline the organizational computing field and discuss its relevance to the decision support system.
(7 Marks)
c) Discuss under what circumstances might designers be more concerned about the “appropriateness of the
format” of the information than the “timeliness” of the information. (6 Marks)
QUESTION FOUR
a) Sunny Bakery is a small grocery store, provides customers’ need and concerned with the
financial- viability of the store. Bread is one of their major daily products. Their problem is to
determine how much bread to stock each day. They decide to explore a few possible
approaches to solve the problem
i) Describe possible approaches to solve this problem (6 Marks)
ii) Design a modeling solution to help them solve the problem (8 Marks)
b) Using a relevant example, discuss how a bank can use excel to determine the loan processing procedure
as part of a simple DSS. (6 Marks)
QUESTION FIVE
Clothes Entreprise is a leading clothing with over 100 departmental stores in Kenya. The
departmental stores have to reconsider the best way to secure and maintain a competitive
advantage. With increasing competition, they are planning on using a sophisticated decision
support system. The existing system in the company handles large amounts of data, however,
inadequate data access and analysis capabilities prevented managers from exploiting the wealth of
information buried in their business transaction.
i) Identify THREE (3) risks in implementing a DSS project in the company. (6 Marks)
ii) Explain how the company is able to gain competitive advantage against its competitors by the
new DSS. (6 Marks)
iii) Give THREE (3) decision situations which can be supported by the new decision support
system. (8 Marks)
