Building a Group Decision Support Laboratory

The author describes the planning, development, and implementation of a GDS laboratory in a new, technologically-advanced engineering, computer science, and IS building. Based on GDS and other collaborative workgroup research, together with needs assimilated from executives and managers of the business community, we set three objectives for the GDS laboratory. These objectives are: 1) to maximize the flexibility of the environment for group decisions and related uses, 2) to maximize the power of the environment to enhance group decisions (including technological and non-technological features), and 3) to provide the ability to continuously improve and evolve the environment as dictated by empirical and theoretical research findings. The resulting laboratory is a vehicle for group decision research and activities.