Towards Measuring the Impact of Management Support Systems on Contemporary Management

This paper conducts a qualitative inquiry into the efforts made in evaluating the impact that management support systems (MSSs) have had on contemporary management and the related theory employed in conducting such evaluations. The paper pursues this dual objective through an extensive literature review. The paper identifies criteria used to assess the success of MSSs and the impact of such systems based on those criteria. The existing literature provides encouraging accounts of successful implementations of MSS projects. However, the absence of a widely accepted theoretical model for more accurately evaluating this success is somewhat glaring. Consequently, the paper proposes a generic MSS evaluation framework for subsequent testing, refinement and usage. The paper advances through five sections: overview of the MSSs landscape; summary of seminal works in various categories of MSSs; critical analysis of existing literature on MSSs; observations and proposal of a generic MSS Evaluation Framework that may be customized for MSS projects; summary and some concluding remarks.