Development of RAPAT: Asynchronous GSS at the Pre-meeting Stages of Strategy Formulation for Indonesian Culture

Research about Group Support Systems and the design of these group support technologies is mainly based on western culture and takes little explicit account of other cultures. While the research reveals promising results on the effectiveness of these technologies, the research results and the technologies themselves may be less effective when applied directly to different cultures or cross-cultural situations. These cultures may require different forms or styles of group support. This paper presents the prototype development of RAPAT (Replicable Asynchronous Pre-meeting Application Templates), an asynchronous GSS for groups engaged in strategy formulation in Indonesia. Indonesian culture has relatively high power distance, low individualism, and weak uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 1980), and high context (Hall and Hall, 1990). The development of RAPAT is based on Lotus TeamRoom templates and can be reconfigured and used by groups with similar culture to Indonesia and the same tasks. This paper presents the requirement and architecture of RAPAT as well as a discussion of aspects of its implementation.