Decision support systems: Detecting factors influencing on export activities

Decision support system (DSS) normally consists of a set of related computer programs and the data required to help with analysis and decision-making within an organization. Many software vendors claim their decision support, analytics or business intelligence applications may provide a competitive advantage by providing different facilities such as business intelligence tools, business performance management software, data mining tools, etc. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine different DSS factors influencing on development of export activities on selected firms which are active in Tehran Stock Exchange. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 35 questions and distributes it among 211 randomly selected managers who were involved in export activities. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.817, which is well above the minimum desirable level. Using principle component analysis, the study has detected five factors including internal resources, management approach, quality of data, efficiency of data and organizational approach, which influence the most on export activities.