Conceptual foundations for the development of organizational decision support systems

Abstract

It is noted that the effort to construct organizational decision support systems (ODSS) is new to the field of information systems but draws heavily on previous experience with decision support systems (DSS) and group decision support systems (GDSS). The conceptual foundations of this new venture are not well established, but the most logical approach to designing ODSS would be to simply scale-up GDSS technologies to deal with larger groups at the organizational level. However, a careful examination of the character of decision processes at the individual, group, and organizational level suggests that organizational decision processes differ significantly from group decision processes, and features of GDSS that are useful at the group level might well be dysfunctional at the organizational level. Simple scale-up is therefore not a recommended approach. Instead, a broader view of organizational decision processes as an open-system problem is presented, in which ODSS technologies might be constructed to facilitate two important, existing features of group decision making: the maintenance of articulated due process and the establishment of boundary objects. >