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.

The design and utilization of Electronic Process Guides (EPGs) have been studied in the Software Engineering (SwE) since the1990's. However, the empirical findings from surveys, case studies, and experiments on the beneficial effectffigures of their utilization are still lacking. Thus, we suggest that further research on the utilization of EPGs is required. In this study, we are interested in gaining insights on the effects of using EPGs on objective metrics (learning score, time effort) and subjective metrics (perceived usefulness, ease of use, and value), by comparing three EPG designs (a simple PDF-based EPG, a normal HTML-based EPG, and a sophisticated Java-based EPG) with different blocks of experimental subjects (practitioners, academicians, novices, and experts). To this end we have conducted a controlled experiment with a sample of international participants in the domain of IT Service Management. We found that the utilization of EPGs improves the objective metrics while no improvements were perceived on the subjective ones, and that the sophisticated EPG design is more appropriate for the academic and expert types of users than for the practitioner and novice types. Thus, our main recommendation for the design and utilization of EPGs is to consider the type of enduser,

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.