Decision support often focuses on substantive rationality (what to choose). The procedural rationality (how to choose) of the process of long-term strategic decision making is then often neglected. In strategic decision making, supporting the decision process is more important than supporting the search for an ‘‘optimal’’ solution to the problem, especially since for most policy problems a well...

Group decision support systems (GDSS) focus on the various processes of decision-making that occur as some form of a business meeting that involves multiple participants. This research reviews the literature for recent advances in GDSS applications in order to identify potential benefits and limitations of GDSS. The analysis specifically considers the elements of effectiveness, efficiency, and ...

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 maximi...

The preparation of research and technology development (RTD) programs calls for the analysis of prospective technological advances and the consideration of ‘lessons learned’ from earlier programs. In this paper, we report experiences from a pilot project in which an internet-based survey and five participatory workshops were organised in conjunction with a Finnish RTD program in telecommunicati...

The paper proposes a two-phase methodology to support groups in multicriteria classification problems. The first phase, which relies on dominance-based rough set approach, takes as input a set of assignment examples, and generates as output a set of collective decision rules representing a generalized description of the preference information of the decision makers. The second phase then applie...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Barriers to publication can be overcome through a peer support writing group in an academic department of family practice. This study describes the experience and outcomes of a writing group in a family practice department. METHODS A writing group was established to provide collaboration in identifying potential research and/or writing projects, to assist individual ...

THE ABILITY TO EFFECTIVELY AND EFFICIENTLY gather, manage, and retrieve voluminous amounts of information is essential to decision makers in today’s information age. Because of time constraints, decision makers face not only the problem of information access but also of information overload. The ability to integrate ideas and knowledge from various sources is particularly important for the effe...

This paper describes a user-interface system developed to support group interaction for same-time/different-place cooperative applications. The user-interface system is based on a model which defines four types of objects, each one dedicated to address a specific issue of group interaction support: information sharing, interaction control, structuring of group interactions and awareness of user...

Electronic communication is becoming more pervasive worldwide with the spread of the Internet, especially through the World Wide Web and electronic mail. Yet, as with all human communication, electronic communication is vulnerable to deceit on the part of senders, and to the less than stellar performance of most people at detecting deceit aimed at them. Despite considerable research over the ye...

This article describes a support group of two years' duration for physically, sexually, and emotionally abused adolescents in an inpatient unit at the University of Michigan Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Hospital. Group characteristics, group dynamics, and emotional reactions of the adolescents are discussed. This experience suggests that a support group does not necessarily need a homogeneo...