A video conferencing system for the United States Army: Group decision making in a geographically distributed environment

The purpose of this article is to review the physical design, software requirements, organizational culture and management issues in a video conferencing system. The audience for the paper is researchers and future users of GDSS from both academia, government and business. The author’s approach will be to discuss software, hardware features, and management improvements potential. Through this system is within the U.S. Army’s culture, business organizations are exploring distributed GDSS. Organizational computing and organizational information for all organizations will hinge on GDSS. Since the author could approach this writing from the academic role, Major in the U.S. Army Reserves or GDSS researcher looking to secure research or grant fund, it is best to choose one role and write accordingly. The author chooses GDSS researcher and will try, without bias, to cover this exciting example of distributed GDSS. The Army’s difficulty in using this system is that after building it, the usage was not as expected. Their purpose is to improve utilization. Initially, the physical system is described. The software support, which doesn’t currently exist, for users (Tool Kit) is defined for various levels of implementation. For constant improvement of the GDSS, evaluation procedures are outlined. Since this effort is viewed as developmental, future research directions are suggested. The Army’s cost justification for the system is the travel cost savings. Cost savings are important to business and government organizations alike; however, the author feels effectiveness will become the driving force in the future. For example, timeliness will gain in value. Currently, the decision process forces a decision when required. This process will change to require a certain level of information and evaluation within the time-frame. These information analyses will be made possible by the distributed GDSS.