Issues in the Design of Group Decision Support Systems

This paper deals with a number of issues pertinent to the design of group decision support systems. It notes that the need for such systems, whether designed by users or vendors, is a consequence of the clash of two important forces: (1) the environmentally-imposed demand for more information sharing in organizations, and (2) the resistance to allocating more managerial and professional time to attending meetings. The paper focuses on three major issues in the design of these systems: 1) system capabilities, 2) system delivery modes, and 3) system design strategies, and discusses the relationship of these issues to system use and survival. The relevance of numeric information, textual information, and relational information in a decision-group context are examined, and various system capabilities for displaying and using such information are noted.