Systematic Approach to Measure Computer Based Information System Acceptance in Decision Making for Organizations in Jordan

The use of computer-based information system (CBIS) helps to facilitate decision makers and empowers them to make decisions in their workplace. A lower acceptance regarding the use of CBIS in private organizations in Jordan, however, leads to unsuitable decision making at various organizational level, which eventually incurred cost and time to organizations. This research, which is based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), has the following objectives: (1) to measure the acceptance level of CBIS in decision making in organizations in Jordan, (2) to identify the decision making attributes (relevant factors) that affect decision making, (3) to develop a conceptual model of acceptance and use of the CBIS in decision making in organizations in Jordan. A questionnaire consisting of the variables such as time, cost, benefits, resources, risk, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, behavior intention to use CBIS, actual use of CBIS, and decision making process of CBIS, were used to collect the data for this study. The population of the study was private organizations registered in Jordan. A total of 642 questionnaires were distributed with the usable questionnaires of 360 returned, with a response rate of 56.07%. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique was used to analyze the data. All the proposed variables were significant except facilitating conditions. This study suggests organizations to take concrete steps to train their employees regarding the use, adoption and ultimately acceptance of CBIS in decision making

Effects of Sensemaking Translucence on Distributed Collaborative Analysis

Collaborative sensemaking requires that analysts share their information and insights with each other, but this process of sharing runs the risks of prematurely focusing the investigation on specific suspects. To address this tension, we propose and test an interface for collaborative crime analysis that aims to make analysts more aware of their sensemaking processes. We compare our sensemaking translucence interface to a standard interface without special sensemaking features in a controlled laboratory study. We found that the sensemaking translucence interface significantly improved clue finding and crime solving performance, but that analysts rated the interface lower on subjective measures than the standard interface. We conclude that designing for distributed sensemaking requires balancing task performance vs. user experience and real-time information sharing vs. data accuracy.Comment: ACM SIGCHI CSCW 201

Supporting Software Development by an Integrated Documentation Model for Decisions

Decision-making is a vital activity during software development. Decisions made during requirements engineering, software design, and implementation guide the development process. In order to make decisions, developers may apply different strategies. For instance, they can search for alternatives and evaluate them according to given criteria, or they may rely on their personal experience and heuristics to make single solution claims. Thereby, knowledge emerges during the process of decision making, as the content, outcome, and context of decisions are explored by developers. For instance, different solution options may be considered to address a given decision problem. In particular, such knowledge is growing rapidly, when multiple developers are involved. Therefore, it should be documented to make decisions comprehensible in the future. However, this documentation is often not performed by developers in practice. First, developers need to find and use a documentation approach, which provides support for the decision making strategies applied for the decision to be documented. Thus, documentation approaches are required to support multiple strategies. Second, due to the collaborative nature of the decision making process during one or more development activities, decision knowledge needs to be captured and structured according to one integrated model, which can be applied during all these development activities. This thesis uncovers two important reasons, why the aforementioned requirements are currently not fulfilled sufficiently. First, it is investigated, which decision making strategies can be identified in the documentation of decisions within issue tickets from the Firefox project. Interestingly, most documented decision knowledge originates from naturalistic decision making, whereas most current documentation approaches structure the captured knowledge according to rational decision making strategies. Second, most decision documentation approaches focus on one development activity, so that for instance decision documentation during requirements engineering and implementation are not supported within the same documentation model. The main contribution of this thesis is a documentation model for decision knowledge, which addresses these two findings. In detail, the documentation model supports the documentation of decision knowledge resulting from both naturalistic and rational decision making strategies, and integrates this knowledge within flexible documentation structures. Also, it is suitable for capturing decision knowledge during the three development activities of requirements engineering, design, and implementation. Furthermore, a tool support is presented for the model, which allows developers to integrate decision capturing and documentation in their activities using the Eclipse IDE