On the development of new forms of organisational decision support systems

Decision making has been a primary interest of OR/MS, and management scientists have been at the forefront of developments. But the rate of implementation has not been high, compared to the application of general PC-based decision support tools. Where there has been some recent success is in the area of judgmental modelling. Examples of exploitation on business problems have been reported and these individual cases are extremely valuable in providing insights into the organisational contexts in which the problems are embedded. However most of them are applications on very simple problems and no real implementation is reported. This paper attempts to overcome this deficiency by looking at a much richer organisational environment and considers two largely unexplored aspects of the decision process, namely its longitudinal nature and the group dimension. In this paper the authors present and discuss the results of three case studies which look into the use of models in a longitudinal decision process, and introduce the associated application of psychological profiling of the group of decision makers involved. All the cases are based in real organisational settings and are not laboratory experiments and therefore little statistical significance can be assigned to the results. But they do provide rich insights into the organisational complexity that surrounds many decisions which should help produce better management tools. The preliminary results suggest that we need to take such characteristics into account when building decision making models if the authors are to enhance the understanding of the decision without inhibiting behaviour.