Improving Decision Making Process in Universities: A Conceptual Model of Intelligent Decision Support System

During recent years, universities have become more and more dependent on the collection, storage and processing of educational data. The dynamics and transformation of military higher education, characterized by complex processes and statuses, generate an immense volume of data, and their acquisition and storage requires the use of the innovation in the IT field. In this context, these universities have become more and more dependent on the collection, storage and processing of educational data. Decision-makers try to apply new strategies and use new tools to convert this data in useful information that would contribute to managerial problem solving. Good decisions involve using some software tools that support decision-making process to maximize the performance of universities and minimize the negative impact of faults. In this paper, we present an overview of intelligent decision support systems (iDSS), and also our own conceptual model in designing a higher education iDSS. The proposed system will be composed of three subsystems working in an integrated manner in order to provide quality services to the iDSS beneficiaries, as follows: the Data Management Subsystem (DMS) that offers the necessary data in order to develop of iDSS models, the Model Management Subsystem (MMS) which generates models on the basis of the data supplied by the DMS and the use of data mining techniques, analytic tools and reporting, the user interface (UI) this facilitates communication between iDSS and the beneficiary, in the sense that the beneficiary supplies the iDSS with data and extracts useful information for the educational process. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of the University of Pitesti, Romania