Intelligent support systems – The next few DSS steps

Abstract

In recent years a number of innovative applications of modern support technology have been presented and published at a number of international conferences. (Such as the HICSS, INFORMS, IFORS, EURO, DSI, ICIS and ECIS conferences.) The challenge for future research is still to explore and understand both successes and failures with the innovative and more advanced intelligent systems constructs. It is a truism in the field that the key problems never appear to be technology related, but they are “people problems”: (i) people have cognitive constraints in adopting intelligent systems, (ii) people do not really understand the support they get and disregard it in favor of past experience and visions, (iii) people cannot really handle large amounts of information and knowledge, (iv) people are frustrated by theories they do not really understand, and (v) people believe they get more support by talking to other people (even if their knowledge is limited). We will explore the lessons learned from implementing hyperknowledge – an intelligent support platform for strategic management – and we will study how this platform may be enhanced with new results in intelligent systems and soft computing. (This paper was originally presented at the ISDSS’99 Conference in Melbourne, July 19–22, 1999.)