Supporting consensus formation in Group Support Systems using the Qualitative Discriminant Process

Group Support Systems (GSS) are software systems that support group work, providing facilities for idea generation, idea organization, rating and ranking, communication, and recording of ideas. Because preference tasks occur frequently in organizational work, the rating and ranking facility is one of the most popular features of GSS. Nevertheless, this area has not received the attention it deserves in GSS research. Ratings in group decision-making contexts require techniques for synthesizing individual scores into group scores. Because the application of these techniques is only meaningful when there exists a relatively high level of consensus that is obtained through human interaction, there is the need for techniques to assess the level of group consensus, and also for supporting consensus building. In this paper, an integrated method for rating and ranking, consensus assessment and consensus building is presented. This approach permits ambiguity in the ratings and yet provides appropriate interval and point numeric estimates; it offers interpretable similarity measures and consensus indicators.