IRIS: a transactions-based DSS for human resources management

Regulatory and internal requirements are creating strong and growing pressures for more effective means of managing human resources. This calls for systems support more capable than is available through traditional MIS methods. There is a crucial need to extend the customary MIS role, beyond providing regular functions and procedures to assure timeliness and integrity of raw data, to be capable of becoming an integral part of the management process itself through ad hoc inquiry and analysis. This must be a facility which is put at the direct and personal disposal of the manager. The degree to which such an information technology genuinely assists a decision maker in pursuing a train of thought is the most relevant and, in the final analysis, perhaps the only true measure of its effectiveness.Currently available data base designs, high-level analysis and inquiry languages and interactive computing have been combined into a systems architecture which makes such decision support systems a practical reality. This paper describes one such system. It is in regular daily use ina highly diverse industrial enterprise as a transaction driven data system, but is designed for the noncomputeroriented manager in a problem-solving situation as the intended ultimate end user.