Conclusions

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Inter-organizational DSSs are emerging as a new frontier in DSSs. The focus of DSSs has been shifting from teams, work groups, and intranet-based organizational DSSs to extranet-based inter-organizational DSSs. The extranets’ built-in technologies are sufficient to make the extranets as rudimentary IODSSs. With the addition of many readily available Web groupware to extranets, IODSSs are an indispensable communication/decision support tool for enhancing inter- organizational competitiveness to achieve system-wide global objectives. In doing so, costs must be minimized, and products must be differentiated. The cost minimization can be achieved by a series of decisions in the value chains, such as inbound logistics, operations, outbound logistics, marketing, services, etc. Over the past three decades, numerous DSSs have been developed to manage each stage of the value chain (Eom & Lee, 1990; Eom, Lee, Kim, & Somarajan, 1998). The goal of future research is to develop integrated models to optimize the extended enterprise as a whole. To do so, a change in management process thinking from a discrete firm-based view to an industry-based perspective of cooperation is necessary.

Furthermore, several ongoing technological developments in the DSSs area can make IODSSs an effective management support tool. They include cross- organizational workflow integration (Kuechler, Vaishnavi, & Kuelchler, 2001; Weigand & van den Heuvel, 2002); an XML (eXtensible Markup Language)- based modeling language for the open interchange of decision models (Kim, 2001); intelligent negotiation agents to interact and negotiate with users or with other agents (Wang, Liao, & Liao, 2002; Wu & Sun, 2002); and an architectural integration of knowledge management, decision support, artificial intelligence, and data warehousing (Bolloju, Khalifa, & Turban, 2002; Nemati, Steiger, Iyer, & Herschel, 2002).

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