Types of Decisions

As a business professional you will face many different types of decisions. Information systems can help you with these decisions. Before getting into how information systems can help you, it may be helpful to understand how information needs vary for different types of decisions. Herbert Simon (1960) developed a widely used view of decisions as falling along a continuum from highly structured to unstructured. (Simon called these programmed and non-programmed, but others have used structured/ unstructured, which we prefer.) Structured decisions are routine and repetitive and often have well-defined procedures for dealing with them. Unstructured decisions, in contrast, are novel and do not have agreed-up procedures for making the decisions. Semi-structured decisions are somewhere in between the two extremes; they have elements that are structured and elements that are unstructured. For structured decisions, we know what information we need and how to use that information. For unstructured decisions, we are not sure exactly what information we need nor do we know exactly how to use the information. This is important to grasp as it helps us understand how different types of information systems can help with decision-making.