Control strategies for group decision support systems: An end-user computing model

In this paper the authors discuss management control strategies for the most general case of a group decision support system (GDSS) where the participating decision makers may be distributed (i.e., not all in the same room) and their activities not necessarily concurrent. By correlating ‘decision rooms’ with centralized computing and a distributed GDSS (DGDSS) with decentralized computing, they argue that the DGDSS presents more serious control problems than the ‘decision room’ situation. The present perception is that a DGDSS constitutes a federation of end users and is therefore a special case of organizational end-user computing. This requires, first, developing control strategies for end-user computing and, then, showing how these strategies can be applied to a DGDSS situation.