Zaraté - Tools for Collaborative Decision-Making

First published 2013 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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ISTE Ltd 2013

The rights of Pascale Zarat to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012949420

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISSN: 2051-2481 (Print)

ISSN: 2051-249X (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-84821-516-0

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd., Croydon, Surrey CR0 4YY

Figures

Courbons decision-making process

DTL (decision time line)

Cauvins decisional process

The progression of Simons phases of decision-making [SIM 77] revisited

Model of collaborative design

Model of the process of collaborative design

Generic model of the process of collaborative decision-making

Architecture of DSSs put forward by [SPR 82]

Architecture of DSSs according to [MAR 03]

Conceptual architecture for I-DMSSs put forward by [FOR 02]

Elementary architecture for a cooperative knowledge-based system put forward by [SOU 96]

Architecture of CDSSs

Knowledge capitalization: a process-oriented model

Tables

Table showing the characteristics of the experiments

Table of the different situations for collective decision-making

Decision support uses techniques and methods drawn from applied mathematics such as optimization, statistics and decision theory and theories from less formal domains such as organizational analysis and cognitive sciences.

While their work has had less of a normative impact than has decision theory, Roy and Bouyssou [ROY 93] view decision support as a science based on three main postulates:

Roy and Bouyssou hold that peoples ability to abstractly represent phenomena and their capacity for hypothetical-deductive reasoning can be and are used in the service of action: the person reflects before intervening, constructing a scenario in his/her head before acting.

Such deduction and modeling, when consciously exercised with a view to enlightening a persons behavior during a decision-making process, is the very essence of decision support.

Roy and Bouyssou define decision support as the activity of someone (a researcher) who, using clearly expressed and reasonably well formalized models, seeks to partially answer the questions which an actor (decision-maker) asks him/herself during the decision-making process. These partial answers, when combined, help illuminate the decision, and normally suggest a certain course of action to help ensure the process is more compatible with the actors goals and guiding values system.

Furthermore, they stress that decision support helps participants in the decision-making process to be constructive, sit down together and share their various convictions. It ensures that there is room for critical discussion to take place, regarding the basis for the decision and how it is taken.

According to Tsoukias [TSO 08], there are a number of approaches to decision support: normative, descriptive, prescriptive and constructive. Regardless of which approach is taken, he considers decision support to be a process involving:

He views decision support as a distributed cognitive process. He also puts forward a set of artifacts generated by the decision support process.

In order to provide decision support as effectively as possible, we must develop software tools.

Numerous systems have been created with the aim of providing the best possible decision support, while fitting into decision support frameworks as fully as possible. These systems are not always used to their full extent. In large organizations, spreadsheet applications are still very widely used for operational level decisions and tactical management decisions.

However, the introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) has considerably altered the process of decisionmaking in organizations. This is our working hypothesis, to which Chapter 1 is devoted.

Based on this working hypothesis, in Chapter 2, we present our investigation of this new context of decision-making. The change in the process is related to the switch from a context where there is a single decision-maker to one where there are multiple decision-makers, operating separately and independently, where the various decision-makers need to cooperate.

It is useful to define exactly what it is that we mean by cooperation. This concept is analyzed in Chapter 3.

Chapter 4 defines and discusses a newly-emerging concept: cooperative decision-making. We present a generic model of this concept.

In order to provide decision support for use in these new cooperative processes, we must develop new tools.

We begin Chapter 5 by defining systems to support decisionmaking in a fairly general sense. Several types of systems will be described: decision support systems (DSSs), intelligent DSSs (IDSSs), cooperative knowledge-based systems, cooperative systems, group decision support systems, business intelligence, collaborative engineering, workflows and cooperative multi-agent systems. We also show in this chapter how the work of certain key users such as facilitators can be supported, and how an approach of collaborative design of all these systems can be drawn up.