Computer-Supported Collaborative Decision-Making

The goal of this chapter is to provide a historical account of the evolutions in the domain of the book and to set the stage for the concepts and solutions to be presented in the following chapters, including the introduction of the terminology adopted to be used throughout this text. Consequently, we aim at providing the answers to a series of questions, such as: (a) “How the organizations have been evolving over the last decades?”, (b) “Which have been the corresponding trends of the management and control schemes?”, (c) “How management and control functions are allocated to human and automation equipment?”, (d) “Which are the desirable properties of the information processing tools meant to support the human agent to carry out his/her tasks?” The remaining part of this chapter is organized as follows. In the first section, we make a review of the ever increasing complexity of the controlled objects over the last four decades and describe the characteristic features of collaborative networks. Next section contains a historical account of the technology and business-driven evolutions of management and control schemes from hierarchical multilevel control to more cooperative solutions. The third section addresses the role of human agent in management and control tasks. In the fourth section, we present the requirements for the human-centered information tools which are meant to support the activities of the person[s] in charge to make decisions in management and control tasks. A brief review of multi-criteria decision models is made in the fifth section and an interpretation of criteria from a multi-participant decision-maker’s perspective is provided in the fifth, final section.

The chapter is meant to familiarize the reader with the general notions concerning a well-defined class of information systems, namely the decision support systems (DSS).

Having described the context for collaborative activities (in Chap. 1), and reviewed the basic aspects of computer supported decision-making activities (in Chap. 2), we will present in this section several specific methods used in collaborative decision making. The methods and techniques presented in the chapter are independent of the information technologies upon they are instantiated.

The previous chapter contained presentations of several relevant collaboration methods. Section 3.​1 indicated that the evolution in e-collaboration was associated with a number of technological breakthroughs.

In previous chapters, we have addressed general concepts concerning collaboration, decision-making, and decision support systems, specific methods to be used by groups, and technologies that influence the development and usage of the information tools meant to support multi-participant collaborative decision processes.