A‐pool: An agent‐oriented open system shell for distributed decision process modeling

An agent‐oriented open system shell, A‐Pool, for distributed decision process modeling in the Internet domain is presented. Unlike most decision support systems, A‐Pool provides a testbed for modeling and understanding the cognitive aspects of distributed decision processes themselves rather than for domain‐specific problem solving. This is achieved with a pool of virtual agents and a pool of cognitive maps of the agents at each A‐Pool node. The virtual agent scheme extends object‐oriented programming to the Internet domain and supports different communication and collaboration protocols with virtual communities, virtual sessions, and virtual conferences. The cognitive map scheme supports perspective sharing and various conflict integration and resolution strategies through cognitive map composition, derivation, and focus generation. Thus each A‐Pool node provides an architecture for modeling interdependencies and for ensuring global coherence; in addition, the communication is asynchronous and the control is distributed, allowing a large degree of autonomy and the examination of various thoughts and social protocols involved in strategic planning in an open system environment. Basic ideas are illustrated with a running example.     

Decision and information systems for strategic planning

Most modern organizations are concerned with how well their strategic planning systems guide the organization. The authors hold that effective strategic planning can be carried on only through the development and implementation of a strategic planning decision and information system (SPDIS). The concept suggests that strategic planning, the management information system, and the organizational structure and management processes are so interdependent that one subsystem cannot be effectively implemented without making appropriate changes in the others. The authors discuss the five critical elements of the SPDIS, recognizing the operational inter-dependence of the subsystems, focusing on support of the strategic decision-making aspect of the manager's job, and emphasizing the role of the manager.     

The multinational corporation as a coordinated network: Organizing and managing differently

A multinational corporation (MNC) has a number of unique advantages. Of these, the flexibility to operate as a coordinated multinational network places the strategic emphasis on resources and learning. Coordination and integration are needed to provide coherence in resource commitments. Operating as a coordinated multinational network can provide the flexibility needed to implement global strategies. A network organization results in linkages and interrelationships that require organizing and managing differentially. This article focuses on the organizational and managerial characteristics that are needed to operate as a coordinated multinational network. These characteristics include: a strong central leadership role; the flexibility to respond to opportunities; a differentiated, multidimensional focus; distributed, interdependent capabilities; the managerial capacity to achieve coordination; and a collaborative decision-making process. This article also discusses the changes needed in structural mechanisms and systems. Explored are the planning process, performance evaluation and control, information technology/management information systems, and human resource management. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Embedding Decision Support in E-Sourcing Tools: Quotes, A Case Study

In the everyday business world, the sourcing process of multiple goods and services usually involves complex negotiations that include discussion of product and service features. Currently, this is a high-cost process due to the scarce use of tools that streamline negotiations and assist purchasing managers' and providers' decision-making. With the advent of Internet-based technologies, it became feasible the idea of tools enabling low-cost, assisted, fluid, on-line dialogs between buyer enterprises and their providers located anywhere. This article presents Quotes, an iSOCO's commercial application that, in addition to cover the whole sequence of sourcing tasks, incorporates decision support facilities based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques that successfully address highly challenging issues in automated negotiation within a single and coherent framework.     

Building consensus in strategic decision making: System dynamics as a group support system

System dynamics was originally founded as a method for modeling and simulating the behavior of industrial systems. In recent years it is increasingly employed as a Group Support System for strategic decision-making groups. The model is constructed in direct interaction with a management team, and the procedure is generally referred to as group model-building. The model can be conceptual (qualitative) or a full-blown (quantitative) computer simulation model. In this article, a case is described in which a qualitative system dynamics model was built to support strategic decision making in a Dutch government agency.Since people from different departments held strongly opposite viewpoints on the strategy, the agency had discussed its strategic problem for more than a year, but was obviously not able to reach consensus. The application of group model-building was successful in integrating opposite points of view, as well as in fostering consensus and creating commitment.The purpose of the article is twofold: first, to illustrate the process of group model-building with system dynamics; second, to evaluate why it was successful. Evaluation results reveal the importance of both systemic thinking through model-building and the role of the facilitator in catalyzing the strategic decision-making process.     

Collaborative Decision-Making in Non-formal Planning Settings

Planning initiatives outside the formal planning system can constitute a favourable environment for implementing and analysing collaborative decision-making processes. The conceptualisation of the decision-making context in the light of the Policy Network analysis helps to better understand the underlining conditions, as well as their influence in the outcomes. In the case under analysis, were the decision-making conditions were of co-responsibility and power-sharing, the challenge has been to warrant the effectiveness of the decisions, which lies, as is argued, in the reliability of the framework for decision-making and in the ability to translate the collaborative participation outputs into actions at different time-frames. Moreover, as the case-study deals with strategic spatial planning, a future oriented approach is needed to warrant the flexibility and robustness of the plan in addressing the uncertainty associated with long term objectives. Those are the critical issues to be handled in the multi-criteria analysis (MCA) framework which sustains the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) that was used to support the decision-making process.     

Integrated Information Supply for Decision Support in Grid Companies

Increasing regulatory requirements such as price cap regulation have increased the importance of strategic grid asset management. Empirical studies reveal that information supply and consolidation are error prone and long-term processes. The reason is the missing automation of extraction, transformation, and loading. The current gap does neither fulfill the requirements of regulatory nor the necessity of standardized reporting. Furthermore, a detailed planning is not enabled and the calculation of key figures is extensive. Currently, a framework that considers the coupling of financial and technical key figures, the coupling of strategic and operative key figures as well as the integration into information systems is not existent. Therefore, this paper addresses the design of a reference model as a recommendation for action to integrate the asset management within information systems. It is validated by expert interviews. Moreover, it provides information to integrate relevant financial and technical artifacts from distributed systems. Simultaneously, it provides recommendations for implementing a Business Intelligence architecture in the context of strategic decision support.     

Explorative Nature of Negotiation in Participatory Decision Making for Sustainability

Land use planning and policy making for environmental systems involve uncertainty, long time scales, and complex socio-natural systems and processes; most decisions are often characterized by conflict and tension and give rise to disagreements which are widely considered and managed as disagreement about socio-environmental values. Although the growing acceptance of participatory models in environmental planning and policy making is forcing the public authorities to implement participatory mechanisms, participation practices are not showing much effectiveness in reducing conflict and tension. This paper argues that negotiation approaches in participatory decision making often pose the attention on disputing actors and their related values (in the field of environmental planning, on socio-environmental values) thus amplifying the risk for conflict to sharpen. Participation practices, in fact, often use Decision and Conflict Analysis models as means to disclose structures of parties’ values and preferences to parties themselves, thus risking to enhance sources for conflict and tension. In this article, participation is conceptualized as an exploration process looking for decision ‘opportunities’ which allow transforming participatory decision making into operational collaboration. To illustrate the discussion we present a case of participatory decision making process in the Torre Guaceto wetland, a Natural Reserve in Southern Italy. The process refers to the formulation of the land use plan and is analysed by the application of a cognitive model. The analysis shows how the negotiation process evolves from a conflict to collaboration and becomes centred on the content of the decision rather than the social and environmental values involved.     

Self-Limiting Dominant Logic: An Exploratory Study of Chinese Entrepreneurial Firms

Previous research has found that cognitive frame, mental models, and schema embody a dominant logic of firms that structure the behavioral routines of managers and can become a central force shaping a firm's decisions and actions. This exploratory study seeks to provide insight into an emerging dominant logic among recently established private-sector Chinese enterprises. Using multiple case studies of Chinese entrepreneurial firms, we identify convergence on a surprisingly similar dominant logic based on closely aligned concepts and accompanying behaviors: a defensive perspective of business environment; a conservative strategic decision-making process; and full involvement of owners and top managers in daily operations that substitute for development of elaborate routines and systems. Although a dominant logic may facilitate decision making and growth, it may also act as a perceptual blinder limiting opportunity search as firms seek to minimize risk in an uncertain environment.     

Stradin: A Strategic Dynamic and Interactive Decision-Making Process

This article proposes a new strategic decision-making process: Stradin. Stradin uses recent developments in computerized network systems and user-friendly interfaces in order to address management challenges of corporations of the 1990s. Five strategic challenges are addressed: (1) finding the right balance in the centralization-decentralization dilemma; (2) conciliating strategic decisions and their operational implementation; (3) finding a balance between role differentiation and integration; (4) using conflict constructively in order to improve decision making; (5) conciliating emerging strategies and continuity. The article below discusses each of these challenges and shows how Stradin can help in meeting them.     

Arguing over Goals for Negotiation: Adopting an Assumption-Based Argumentation Decision Support System

Computational models of argumentation has been put forward as a promising approach to support decision making. In this context several recent works have proposed argumentation-based frameworks for decision making. In this paper we describe an application based on an argumentation-based mechanism for decision-making to concede. Adopting the assumption-based approach of argumentation, we propose an argumentation framework in which preferences are attached to goals. Arguments are defined as tree-like structures. Our framework is equipped with a computational counterpart for solving a decision problem, modeling the intuition that high-ranked goals are preferred to low-ranked goals which can be withdrawn. In this way, our framework suggests some decisions and provides an interactive and intelligible explanation of this choice. Our implementation, called MARGO, has been used for service selection within the ArguGRID project. We illustrate our approach with an industrial application, and illustrate the operation of the system with a running example.     

Consumer strategic decision making and choice process: prefabricated house purchase

This study examines the consumer choice process in case of strategic purchases, such as house buying. In view of the existing literature exploring consumer decision making and choice for strategically important products, the purpose of this research is twofold: (a) to develop a conceptual model of strategic decision making; and (b) to empirically explore this model with regard to prefabricated house purchases. The results of our qualitative research suggest that in addition to the idiosyncratic characteristics of the customer, his or her personal situation, environmental factors, the role of feelings, experience, subconscious factors, needs, and goals should to be taken into account to better understand strategic consumer decision making and their choice process when buying a house.     

Behavioral research and empirical modeling of marketing channels: Implications for both fields and a call for future research

Game theoretic models of marketing channels typically rely on simplifying assumptions that, from a behavioral perspective, often appear naïve. However, behavioral researchers have produced such an abundance of behavioral regularities that they are impossible to incorporate into game theoretic models. We believe that a focus on three core findings would benefit both fields; these are: first, beliefs that are held by the various players regarding profit consequences of different actions are incomplete and often biased; second, players’ preferences and optimization objectives are not commonly known; and third, players have insufficient cognitive abilities to achieve optimization objectives. Embracing these three findings shifts the focus from rational decision making to how decision makers learn to improve their decision-making skills. Concluding, we believe that greater convergence of game theoretic modeling and behavioral research in marketing channels would lead to new insights for both fields.     

基于分布式数据挖掘的连锁商业企业经营决策分析

分布式经营系统是大型连锁商业企业发展的基础,采用分布式数据挖掘辅助连锁商业企业决策是一种理想选择。连锁商业企业经营决策可以通过基于分布式数据挖掘的全局控制站点决策模式和分站点决策模式,各站点的独立和全局的综合来实行;基于分布式数据挖掘的决策机制与集中式数据挖掘的决策机制相比有划分粒度小、分析与综合性强、面向顾客的灵活度高等特点;并实现了一个客户细分的决策过程。     

高管团队决策行为与决策绩效关系:行为整合的中介效应分析

战略选择是一个非常复杂、含义广泛的决策过程,而复杂的决策是管理团队许多决策行为相互作用的结果,研究行为整合在决策过程中的作用机制对战略管理理论、高层梯队理论和行为决策理论有重要的意义。根据行为决策理论,提出了决策行为、行为整合对决策绩效影响的假设模型。实证研究表明,在决策过程中,程序理性和直觉行为正向影响决策绩效,行为整合可以加强这两种决策行为的正向作用;政治行为负向影响决策绩效,行为整合可以削弱政治行为的负向作用。     

Organisational context and behavioural problems as determinants of the effectiveness of the strategic marketing planning process

This paper continues the authors’ recent work on organisational behaviour by arguing that the differences between theory and parctice in marketing planning can be better understood by analysing the corporate environment for marketing management. Thus, variables such as organisational structure, the configuration of corporate decision making processes, patterns of managerial behaviour and the impact of corporate culture, can help us to understand how marketing planning processes operate in practice.

The authors contention is that the real problems associated with the strategic marketing planning process should be grounded in the realities perceived by executives. They go on to discuss a number of common pitfalls in the planning process before reporting on an exploratory empirical study of UK firms with over 100 employees. The implication of the results is seen as reselling the management agenda with regard to the process of marketing planning.     

Artificial intelligence and the future of work: Human-AI symbiosis in organizational decision making

Artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated many organizational processes, resulting in a growing fear that smart machines will soon replace many humans in decision making. To provide a more proactive and pragmatic perspective, this article highlights the complementarity of humans and AI and examines how each can bring their own strength in organizational decision-making processes typically characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and equivocality. With a greater computational information processing capacity and an analytical approach, AI can extend humans’ cognition when addressing complexity, whereas humans can still offer a more holistic, intuitive approach in dealing with uncertainty and equivocality in organizational decision making. This premise mirrors the idea of intelligence augmentation, which states that AI systems should be designed with the intention of augmenting, not replacing, human contributions.     

Integrating Decision-Making Support in Geocollaboration Tools

Collaborative spatial decision making (CSDM) involves multiple stakeholders making strategic decisions based on spatial data. Current CSDM tools have been exploring different ways to integrate spatial data with collaboration, distribution and mobility. Notably, decision-making support has not seen the same level of attention. This paper discusses the challenges raised by the integration of decision-making models in CSDM tools. We review a large collection of decision-making models using three different views: sequential, dynamic and continuous. From this review we derive a conceptual model and a set of functional requirements necessary to integrate decision-making support in CSDM tools. The conceptual model highlights the importance of several functions in decision-making processes: representing problems, finding alternatives and making choices (sequential view); classification and communication (dynamic view); and perception, comprehension and projection (continuous view). The paper also describes a prototype developed to validate the model. The paper provides two main research contributions: a unified view of decision-making support and an innovative CSDM tool blending spatial data with decision-making support.