DSS has a long history of success in scholarship and practice. BI and Personal DSS systems are now an integral part of most managers’ work and DSS scholars have contributed significantly to IS theory in areas such as evolutionary systems development, multi-dimensional data structures, critical success factors, group processes, and managerial information behaviours. Despite this history of achievement, the discipline is at an important turning point. It is increasingly removed from practice, is relatively unsuccessful in major competitive grant funding, and does not have the presence in ‘A’ journals that it should. The analysis of the methodological and theoretical foundations of DSS provided in this paper gives important insight into the field’s underperformance.

A major theme of our analysis is the conservatism of the field. The evidence for this lies with:

This evidence provides the foundations for our major recommendations. First, DSS must embrace more contemporary reference theory in judgement and decision making. This applies to research on all types of DSS. DSS researchers should look for this reference research not only in psychology, but in business and other social science fields as well. Second, researchers should shift their objects of study toward data warehousing and EIS/BI. In effect, such a shift would move researchers from a well accepted, well established comfort zone to the messy reality of current practice. The fundamental research questions of DSS that relate to how to support managers in important decision tasks would need little change. Third, DSS researchers need to embrace more diversity in epistemology and methodology. In an applied field struggling for professional relevance, a significant amount of theorising and exploratory research needs to be undertaken. This research should be focused on concepts and theory that will lead to the reshaping of the ideas and methods of influential professionals (Lyytinen, 1999). This attention to research with fundamental and long lasting effect on practice is much more important than orienting projects towards the short term concerns of CIOs.

The design science heritage of DSS is very important for IS as a whole since the parent discipline shares DSS’s problem of declining professional relevance, albeit to a lesser extent (Benbasat and Zmud, 1999; Argarwal and Lucas, 2005). One aspect of the relevance decline has been the pursuit of research rigor; another has been a decline in the number of quality studies that address systems development. A number of influential IS researchers have called for greater attention on the IT artifact in research designs and the greater use of quality design-science designs (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001; Markus et al., 2002). DSS’s long experience with design science can inform its increasing application in general IS. For example, in the landmark MIS Quarterly paper on the conduct of design science research in IS (Hevner et al., 2004) two of the three exemplar studies analysed were from DSS. Importantly, design-science research can link researchers to practitioners in creative and influential ways.

Related to the analysis in this paper, two further investigations of the intellectual foundations of DSS are under way. The first is a critical review of DSS design-science research using the guidelines developed by Hevner et al. (2004). The aim of this analysis is to provide prescriptions for improving the rigor and relevance of DSS design science research. The second project is a more detailed analysis of the judgement and decision-making foundations of DSS research with a special emphasis on the role Simon’s theory of behavioural decision-making has played in shaping the field.

We finish this paper with a call-to-arms to other IS researchers. The IS discipline faces a critical period in its development. There has been a significant downturn in IS-related IT activities and spending in OECD countries. There are also serious questions over the direction and relevance of IS research (Benbasat and Zmud, 2003). An important aspect of understanding our current situation and developing research agendas for the future is the rigorous analysis of high-quality published research. The literature analysis project described in this paper can support DSS disciplinary development. Other branches of IS scholarship need to follow this lead.