Although the DSS community generally shows interest in distributed computing when building decision support systems, the use of distributed technologies often remains limited to extension services added to traditional, local DSS functionalities. In other words, distributed computing rarely change the intrinsic (and local) behavior of the DSS.

This paper describes the inception phase of the development process of a Framework for Developing Distributed Cooperative Decision Support Systems (DSSs). It analyzes the reasons why the broad use of DSSs has not occurred yet and makes propositions to improve this situation. It shows that, for the most part, modern distributed computing architectures could solve many of the presented issues. In the first section, this paper gives an overview of DSSs, based on definitions, history, taxonomies and DSS architectures. In the second section, it covers three categories of problems in the DSS area: human factors, conceptual factors and technical factors. To finish, it proposes possible solutions to these problems using concepts borrowed from new distributed computing architectures.