Group decision support systems

Computers are used to support collaboration among members of a business team. The specific application is the augmentation of meetings. The motivation, approach, and empirical results are presented

Intelligent reports for group decision support systems

The topic of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) is a not a recent one. In fact, it has been studied for the last three decades. In this work, we deal with the topic of Intelligent Reports in GDSS’ context. A defective interaction between the system and the decision-maker may lead to the complete failure of the GDSS. However, the study on how and which kind of information should be exposed to decision-makers is almost non-existent. Therefore, it is important to create reports adapted to the specific necessities of each decision-maker so that each one can acknowledge the advantage to use the system and feel motivated to do so. We believe that in this work, we approach important points that require special attention when developing Intelligent Reports. We navigate through all the important factors that affect decision-makers while making a decision. We detail each point and link them to all related questions and to which kind of structure an Intelligent Report should have in order to not compromise the success of the GDSS.This work has been supported by COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043, by National Funds through the FCT - Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology within the Projects UID/CEC/00319/2013, UID/EEA/00760/2013, and the João Carneiro PhD grant with the reference SFRH/BD/89697/2012.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Requirements of knowledge sharing for group decision support system

Group decision support systems (GDSS) have evolved from applications designed primarily to support decision making for groups. Indeed, it is generally accepted that improvements of group support systems is a longstanding interest to organizational researchers, containing solid practical as well as scientific significance. Within this practice, there is increasing challenge to improve the exchange of knowledge among group members in order to enhance GDSS capability of knowledge sharing. Therefore, the paper investigates the current GDSS situation and analyzing the requirements of knowledge sharing (KS) to enhance GDSS. It is hoped that these findings will aid to provide GDSS systems with the solid capability of knowledge sharing

Communicative Action In Group Decision Support Systems

This paper addresses some issues of communication in group settings. The contribution of the paper is in relating group decision making to Habermas’ theory of communicative action. This is a rich sociological theory of how communication and distortions of communication occur in social communities. The paper introduces the background of this theory and develops a structure from the theory within which to embed group dynamics. This structure was used to evaluate the results of several group interactions during which masters level students solved a complex case using a prescribed systems methodology. Group membership was manipulated in two ways: first by giving a Myers/Briggs type personality test and second by asking the students to answer questions about their perceptions about the characters and situations appearing in the case. The results reveal that group diversity and homogeneity may after the quality of group outcomes. The paper is divided into five sections. The first section gives some background of Habermas’ theory from the perspective of the philosophy of science. The second develops a specific interpretation of Habermas’ theory for the purposes of this paper. The third describes the individual and group tasks while the forth gives an interpretation of the results. In the final section, some tentative conclusions and directions for further research are discussed

Informal Online Decision Making: Current Practices and Support System Design

Existing group decision support systems are too complex to support lightweight, informal decision making made popular by the amount of information available on the Web. From an examination of related work, an online survey and a formative study to examine how people currently use the Web for decision support, we present a set of design recommendations towards the development of an informal Web decision support tool

A multi-agent system to support location based group decision making in mobile teams

This paper describes an agent-based approach for developing a location-based asynchronous group decision-support system for mobile teams. The approach maximises the use of reusable service components (GSCmas — generic service component for multi-agent systems) as the main interaction mechanism between agents to allow flexible support of a new group-decision process. The paper describes the architecture of a GSCmas and provides details of how the GSCmas is integrated within a decision support system. Finally a system (mPower) based on the proposed approach is introduced and applied to a location-based group decision problem

Quality of knowledge in group decision support systems

In this work it is addressed the problem of knowledge evaluation in a VirtualECare Group Decision Supporting System (GDSS), in terms of an Multi-valued Extended Logic Programming language, which is aimed at sustaining online healthcare services. Indeed, reasoning with incomplete and uncertain knowledge have to be dealt with, due to the particular nature of the healthcare services, where the awful consequences of bad decisions, or lack of timely ones, demand for a responsible answer

Group Support Systems: The Effects of Mixing Support Systems on Information Pooling, Decision Time, and Decision Quality

Most group support systems (GSS) laboratory studies compare face-to-face groups with groups assigned to either a synchronous or asynchronous decision support system. Research findings have been inconclusive. A laboratory study that compared face-to-face groups with mixed support mode groups was conducted to determine the effectiveness of selectively using information technology to support the group process and explain some of the variability in research findings. Groups that shared information using a Web-based asynchronous system and discussed the shared information in a face-to-face meeting environment, assembled more information and made higher quality decisions in less time than groups that shared and discussed information in a face-to-face meeting environment

Group decision support systems for current times: Overcoming the challenges of dispersed group decision-making

We are living a change of paradigm regarding decision-making. On the one hand, there is a growing need to make decisions in group at both professional and personal levels, on the other hand, it is increasingly difficult for decision-makers to meet at the same place and at the same time. The Web-based Group Decision Support Systems intend to overcome this limitation, allowing decision-makers to contribute to the decision process anytime and anywhere. However, they have been defined inadequately which has been compromising its success. This work discusses the current Group Decision Support Systems limitations in terms of challenges and possible impediments for their acceptance by the organizations and propose a conceptual definition of a Web-based Group Decision Support System that intends to overcome the existing limitations and help them to affirm as a reliable and useful tool. In addition, some crucial topics are addressed, such as communication and perception, that are essential and sometimes forgotten in the support of dispersed decision-makers. We concluded that there are still some limitations, mostly in terms of models and applications, that prevent the design of higher quality systems.This work was supported by the GrouPlanner Project (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-29178) and by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within the Projects UIDB/00319/2020 and UIDB/00760/2020