Can DSS evolve without changing our view of the concept of ‘problem’?

DSS have almost exclusively been presented in the context of problem solving. But the term ‘problem’ is never defined. It is unfortunately a fairly ambiguous term whose meaning oscillates from the observation of an unsatisfactory, objective reality which must be corrected, to the subjective representation of one or more actors faced with a reality which he or they perceived as unsatisfactory. The first of these interpretations (i.e., a problem as an unsatisfactory objective reality) implicitly dominates the DSS literature and design methods, which does not avoid the hidden major stumbling block of ‘problem definition’. We believe that the adoption of the second interpretation (i.e., a problem as a subjective representation) is a better guarantee of the effectiveness of DSS and leads to different design methods (we propose one based on a systemic method oriented towards ‘soft problems’) and opens new horizons for potential application to DSS.