A Case Study of Web-Based Collaborative Decision Support at NASA

Today, organizations rely on decision makers to produce “mission critical” decisions that are based on inputs from multiple domains. The ideal decision maker has a profound understanding of specific domains, coupled with the experience that allows them to act quickly and decisively on the information. Daily they face problems and failures that are too difficult for any individual person to solve; therefore, teams are now required to share their knowledge in spontaneous collaborations. Since requisite expertise may not all reside in the same organization, nor be geographically colocated, virtual networked teams are needed. This chapter presents a case study describing the development and use of Postdoc, NASA’s Webbased collaborative and knowledge management platform. IntroductIon Knowledge intensive organizations rely on decision makers to produce mission-critical decisions based on inputs from multiple domains (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). The ideal decision maker has a profound understanding of specific domains that influence the decision-making process, coupled with the experience that allows quick and decisive action based on such information (Becerra-Fernandez, Gonzalez, & Sabherwal, 2004; Davenport & Prusak, 1998). The ideal decision maker is usually someone who has lengthy experience and implicit knowledge gained from years of observation (Leonard & Swap, 2004, 2005; Senge, 1990). While the profile of today’s ideal decision maker does not mark a significant departure from past practices, the following four underlying trends