Decision-Making Support Systems in Quality Management of Higher Education Institutions: A Selective Review

The provision of high-quality educational services is a mandatory objective for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) nowadays. Consequently, HEIs implement Quality Management System (QMS) process frameworks. A core managerial activity conducted in these QMS is decision making, which impacts the overall quality of the provided HEI's educational services. This managerial context found in HEIs demands an adequate and reliable managerial decision-making support. In this article, we elaborate a new Process-Task-Decision scheme for HEIs based on a relevant international QMS process framework (ISO 9001 IWA 2:2007), and we survey selectively DMSS and HEI literature in the 1996-2016 period. We found that DMSS have been used in a variety of Process-Task-Decision situations in HEIs from early periods to the present, but their utilization is still scarce and partially deployed. Thus, open opportunities to apply them in HEIs and relevant knowledge gaps still exist to be further researched.