Bridging the digital divide in Caribbean group decision making

Caribbean organizations, like their counterparts in developed countries, engage in countless group decision meetings that require structuring mechanisms to help produce effective outcomes. However, no such meeting support was available to the breakout sessions at the January 2003 meeting of the United Nations information and communication technologies (UNICT) task force to discuss the digital divide as it affects Caribbean community and common market (CARICOM) countries. Whereas group support systems (GSS) have been widely discussed in the literature, there is no evidence of their use in the English-speaking Caribbean, a situation which may be classified as another instance of the digital divide. Against this backdrop, we examine the process of organizational decision-making within groups, the factors influencing group behaviors and interaction and the advantages and disadvantages of structuring mechanisms such as the technology-enabled GSS and the manual, nominal group technique (NGT). The paper concludes that it is desirable for Caribbean nations to acquire GSS technology to reap some of the benefits that other developing countries have experienced. However, despite its runner-up status (to GSS), NGT provides similar assistance to that offered by GSS, is implementation-friendly, inexpensive, and outperforms other manual techniques in creative decision-making; it is therefore a viable alternative for Caribbean nations struggling to bridge the digital divide.