David Ness and the Origin of Decision Support Systems

In 1975 Wharton created a department called Decision Sciences. Most people hadn't heard of it.

David Ness was one of its founding architects. He was a father of Decision Support Systems, a discipline built on a deceptively simple premise: computing and organizational design have to work together. Technology doesn't improve decisions by existing. It improves decisions when the organization is designed to absorb it.

That idea was radical in 1975. Most technologists were focused on what computers could do. Ness was focused on what organizations needed to change so computers could actually matter.

His colleague at Wharton was Jay Galbraith, whose 1977 book argued that organizations exist to process information and make decisions. When information flows freely to the right decision-makers, organizations gain real competitive advantage. When it doesn't, that advantage goes to someone else. Ness and Galbraith were building the same argument from two directions. One mapping how organizations should be designed. The other designing how technology systems should support the humans doing the processing.

Only a handful of universities in the country were building Decision Sciences departments. Wharton was one of them.

Ness earned his bachelor's at MIT, where in the 1960s he worked on Project MAC, one of the pioneering research projects that advanced the development of computer operating systems. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar alongside David Souter, who would become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He came back and finished his PhD at MIT. Then famously refused to sit for his final dissertation defense.

MIT made him a tenured professor anyway.

The Dean of Wharton recruited him personally to help build the department.

He was also my professor. And over time, my mentor and my friend.

What Ness taught wasn't a framework. It was a way of thinking. How organizations process information. Where decisions actually get made versus where people think they get made. Why rational systems produce irrational outcomes. How to design for the way people behave rather than the way they should behave.

I sought him out because I understood what he was building. He knew it. That's how a student becomes a colleague and a colleague becomes a friend.

In 1993 Wharton dissolved the Decision Sciences department. Eighteen years. They didn't understand what they had.

David Ness passed in 2006. He never saw what his work became.

Forty years later every major technology company on earth is trying to hire someone who does.

AI is the most powerful decision support system ever built. The organizations that use it well will be the ones that understand how decisions actually flow through an enterprise before they deploy it.

Ness understood that before the tools existed to act on it at scale. Before anyone called it AI strategy. Before any of it became a board agenda item.

I was lucky enough to be in the room.