Decision Making Process: A Collaborative Perspective

Pascale ZARATÉ
Université de Toulouse, INPT-IRIT
118 route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cedex 9, France

Abstract: The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in organisations implies an evolution of the decision making processes. This evolution is analysed on a cognitive and organisational point of view. These processes are analysed and described. The necessity to cooperate is then shown and we finally underline the fact that new systems must be designed in order to support the decision making process.

Keywords: Decision Making, Decision Support Systems, Cooperative Decision Support Systems.

Pascale Zaraté is an assistant professor at Toulouse University (INPT). She conducts her research projects at the IRIT laboratory (http://www.irit.fr). She holds a PhD in Computer Sciences / Decision Support from the LAMSADE laboratory at the Paris Dauphine University, Paris (1991). She also holds a Master degree in Computer Science from the Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France (1986); as well as a Bachelors degree Toulouse, France (1982). Pascale Zaraté’s current research interests include: distributed and asynchronous decision making processes; knowledge modelisation; cooperative knowledge based systems; cooperative decision making. Since 2000, she has been head of the Euro Working Group on DSS (www.euro-online.org). Since she obtained her PhD degree, she has edited a book, 9 special issues in several international journals and 4 proceedings of workshops. She published 29 papers, 10 of them in scientific international journals such as Journal of Decision Systems, Group Decision and Negotiation, EJOR. She has been elected expert review for the LACCIR foundation and the Science Academy of Czech Republic. In 2000 she was Co-President of the program committee of the COOP2002 conference. She is a member of the Scientific Committee of two International Journals: Journal of Decision Systems, ComSIS, Intelligent Decision Technologies and is associated editor of the Decision Support Systems Technology Journal. She is chairing the IFIP TC8/WG8.3 conference devoted to Collaborative Decision Making.

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CITE THIS PAPER AS:
Pascale ZARATÉ, Decision Making Process: A Collaborative Perspective, Studies in Informatics and Control, ISSN 1220-1766, vol. 17 (2), pp. 225-230, 2008.

1. Introduction

[1] has shown that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) introduction in organisations obligatory leads to a time fragmentation. He also shows that the information overload is both a source and a consequence of this overload.

Nevertheless, with the great development of the ICT, the Decision Support Systems become partially usable: only when the decision makers meet each other. The collaborative work among several actors involved in a decisional process is reinforced. It becomes then essential to model the cooperation for the collaborative work.

Due to the economic evolution, the decisional processes in organisations present a great evolution. The reactivity obligation for companies and the technological evolution face the consequences that the cognitive and organisational decisional processes have been considerably modified.

7. Conclusion

According to [16] electronic communication has some effects on the group behaviour and she concludes by:

An electronic meeting can be used as an ante-meeting to gather information and solicit opinions before a decision to be made face-to-face;
Face-to-face decision making probably is the best when a decision requires complex thinking and subtle multiparty negotiations, and when problems are ill-defined (p. 191).

[17] concludes his study by assuming that: the study of the effectiveness of decision making could be studied, in order to highlight that too much technologies could generate negative effects, in particular the decline of consensus and personal participants implication.

All these effects led us to think that a methodology of Collective DSS use has also to be defined. [17] concludes his study by assuming that face to face meeting must be planned during all along the group work, with a sufficient number, by using classical synchronous electronic meeting systems.

We are convinced by the fact that meeting points have to be introduced all along the group decision making process. This process has to be managed as a classical project and methodologies coming from project management domain could also be used. The meeting points have the same utility than the milestones in project management and offer the advantages of the face to face situation.

Our perspective of this work is to develop a methodology of Management for Collective Decision Making Processes supported by Cooperative Decision Support Systems.

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