Facilitating collaboration: Issues in multi-organizational group decision support in voluntary, informal collaborative settings

The development of group decision support (GDS) methods has become an increasingly developed theme in the Operational Research OR world and elsewhere. Many such methods have been well tried and shown to be effective within a variety of organizational settings. This paper is based upon work which has aimed to use the methods beyond the confines of a single organizational client into a multi-organizational setting where collaboration between organizations is voluntary and informal. Specific issues arising out of this context are reflected upon and, in the process, two frameworks are developed, one for categorizing different types of actors involved, the other for categorizing the reflections themselves. It is suggested that both the reflections and the framework may not only be useful to others acting as facilitators in multi-organizational settings, but also provide a relevant contribution to the descriptive literature on GDS in general.