Decision support systems (DSS) have evolved significantly since the past 50 years. The existing bouquet of DSS contributions offering the prevalent emphasis and future orientations of the field also point towards several shortcomings. The existing conceptualizations of DSS offer a fragmented portrayal of the field, with a demarcation of the academia and the industry. The literature also presented a disjoint representation of the tenets of DSS. We address these concerns in this research by synthesizing the conceptual elements of DSS towards a coherent understanding of the field. We resort to an automated content analysis procedure using text mining in an open-source platform. Lexical analysis, topic modeling, and other data mining techniques were used to unveil the latent elements of DSS. Our findings indicate the three underlying themes of DSS as 'Plan', 'Design', and 'Use'. We further identified the elements of pivotal importance of DSS that helped us in re-conceptualizing the understanding of DSS. Our validation of the notion of DSS based on the practitioner's viewpoints also attended to the issue of the academia-industry divide in terms of the perception of DSS. Further, we propose an extension of the ‘Plan-Design-Use’ model through a feedback loop based on which we present the future design possibilities in DSS in terms of the reusability of the extant DSS contributions.

过去50年以来，决策支持系统（DSS）有了长足发展。现有的一系列DSS贡献提供了该领域的普遍重点和未来方向，也指出了一些缺点。DSS的现有概念提供了该领域的零碎描述，同时还对学术界和行业进行了划分。文献还提出了DSS宗旨的脱节表示。在本研究中，我们通过综合DSS的概念元素以对该领域的一致理解来解决这些问题。我们采用在开源平台上使用文本挖掘的自动化内容分析程序。词汇分析，主题建模和其他数据挖掘技术被用来揭示DSS的潜在元素。我们的发现表明，DSS的三个基本主题是“计划”，“设计”和“使用”。我们进一步确定了DSS至关重要的要素，这些要素帮助我们重新概念化了对DSS的理解。基于从业者的观点，我们对DSS概念的验证还涉及到关于DSS感知的学术界与行业界的分歧。此外，我们提出了通过反馈回路扩展“计划-设计-使用”模型的基础，在此基础上，我们根据现有DSS贡献的可重用性提出了DSS中未来的设计可能性。基于从业者的观点，我们对DSS概念的验证还涉及到关于DSS感知的学术界与行业界的分歧。此外，我们提出了通过反馈回路扩展“计划-设计-使用”模型的基础，在此基础上，我们根据现有DSS贡献的可重用性提出了DSS中未来的设计可能性。基于从业者的观点，我们对DSS概念的验证还涉及到关于DSS感知的学术界与行业界的分歧。此外，我们提出了通过反馈回路扩展“计划-设计-使用”模型的基础，在此基础上，我们根据现有DSS贡献的可重用性提出了DSS中未来的设计可能性。