1990 and beyond: Developing a process for group decision support in large scale event planning

The mounting of a Large Scale Event (LSE) (such as an Olympics or Expo) in a city or country can be much more than an end in itself. Such an event also provides many opportunities for long-term development. This paper describes a Group Decision Support Sytem (GDSS) for assisting decision makers in local public sector organisations to make use of the opportunities provided by the staging of such an event. A general conceptualisation of the GDSS approach is described prior to outlining its application to the management of a specific large scale event, Glasgow 1990. The approach, developed from an established strategic management methodology, SODA, is designed to take account of the unique aspects of large scale event management, which tend to be multi-organisational in nature. As a result of this emphasis the GDSS approach pays more attention to group and meta-process issues, compared to other approaches which are more technology oriented. The Jelassi and Beauclair framework for classifying GDSS provides a useful means of describing these main differences. Glasgow 1990 provides a specific application for evaluating the approach, the results of which suggest that in similar solutions GDSS needs a wider focus including group and meta-process aspects. As the GDSS described incorporates this wider focus, it may have applications in situations other than large scale event management.