Understanding how metadata and explanations can better support data warehousing and related decision support systems: an exploratory case study

Many businesses have made or are making significant investments in data warehouses (DWs) and marts that are designed to support a myriad of decision support systems (DSSs). Due to the newness of DWs and related DSSs, the nature of the decision support provided to DSS users and the importance of meta-data and explanations within that support have not been documented. An exploratory case study has been undertaken at two organizations that are using DWs to support a particular type of DW-DSS - customer relationship management (CRM) systems. CRM systems were selected as a representative DW-DSS due to the large number of system users and the various types of DSS tools that these systems typically encompass. The DSS decision performance model suggested by P. Todd and I. Benbasat (1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999) has been employed as a framework for this exploration. Constructs from S. Gregor and I. Benbasat´s (1999) meta-analysis of explanation use were used to guide the investigation of the explanations.