Fuzzy DSS enhance cognitive support for strategic planning in an uncertain environment

Recent studies of DSS have raised serious questions regarding the conflict between the ideal of DSS as aids to ill-structured problem-solving and the reality of DSS implementations which tend to focus on moderately- to well-structured problems. Lack of tools to aid certain types of cognitive effort relates directly to this concern. An additional worry is that incorporating inappropriate cognitive tools may do more harm than good. The potential for distortion or miscarriage of the decision process is great in the area of strategic planning. Supporting symbolic representation and reasoning for this area with tools involving fuzzy sets technology has worked very well for Carlssen and Walden (1993) with the Finnish forest products industry. Augmenting the decision support toolkit with fuzzy-set-theoretic tools as needed can open the door to more successful design and implementation of DSS