Conversation Oriented Decision Support Systems for Organizations - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 118

Chapter 8
Conversation Oriented
Decision Support Systems
for Organizations

Paulo Garrido
University of Minho, Portugal

AbstrAct

This chapter proposes concepts for designing and developing decision support systems that acknowledge,
explore and exploit the fact that conversations among people are the top-level “supporting device” for
decision-making. The goal is to design systems that support, configure and induce increasingly effective
and efficient decision-making conversations. This includes allowing and motivating participation in
decision-making conversations of any people who may contribute positively to decision-making and to
the quality of its outcomes. The proposal sees the sum total of decisions being taken in an organization
as the global decision process of the organization. The global decision process of the organization is
structured in decision processes corresponding to organizational domains. Each organizational domain
has associated a unit decision process. If the organizational domain contains organizational sub-domains,
then its compound decision process is the union and composition of its unit decision process and the
unit decision processes of its sub-domains. The proposal can be seen as extending, enlarging and inte-
grating group decision support systems into an organization-wide system. The resulting organizational
decision support system, by its conversational nature, may become the kernel decision support system
of an organization or enterprise. In this way, the global decision process of the organization may be
made explicit and monitored. It is believed that this proposal is original.

introduction

aspect of such enlargement has been the develop-
ment of automatic control devices that substitute
people in taking decisions that guide machines
and other physical systems. Another has been the
development of decision support systems (DSSs),
information systems for decision support, covering

Information and communication systems substi-
tute and enlarge human capabilities. A striking