L. Floyd Lewis

A decision support system for face-to-face groups

Several recent trends have converged to make the concept of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) important at this time. This paper describes the design, development, and testing of one GDSS tool as an initial step toward building a compre hensive system. A network of microcomputers was used to implement this tool, then the author studied its use by a large number of groups in a controlled laboratory setting. The GDSS proved to have some beneficial impacts on the group process as well as on the final product (decision) for the groups using the computers, as compared to groups using a booklet, or groups with no help. Suggestions for future experimental inves tigations are offered, as well as potential techniques for impro ving and expanding the GDSS.

The adoption and use of collaboration information technologies: international comparisons

Information technology (IT) applications to support group decision processes have been of considerable interest over the years. With the emergence of virtual team arrangements and the advent of emerging information and networking technologies, an increasing amount of attention is now being aimed at understanding collaboration among group members, as they make decisions to accomplish tasks. Effective and efficient collaboration is critical from a decision quality and decision timeliness standpoint. Commonly known as collaborative information technologies (CITs), many technology solutions have the capability to enhance collaboration and facilitate group decisions in task accomplishment by enabling better communication, sharing of information, ideas, expertise, and evaluating alternatives, irrespective of time and distance barriers. Many studies have investigated such individual CIT solutions in different regional settings. However, despite the fact that no single medium can support collaboration in different types of tasks, there is a scarcity of research investigating the adoption and use of multiple CIT options across regions. This paper builds upon innovation diffusion theory and tests a research model to validate five antecedents of collective adoption and use of seven CITs in the US, Australia, and Hong Kong. Sub-sample analyses of data collected from 344 organizations in these three regions suggest that not only do adoption and use patterns of some CIT solutions vary across regions but so do the antecedents that explain their proliferation. Implications of our findings are discussed for practitioners and researchers.

Script Management A Link between Group Support Systems and Organizational Learning

An important contribution of Group Support Systems (GSSs) may come from improvement of organizational memory and learning through dynamic script management. The evolution of script management is briefly outlined with suggested links to organizational memory and learning. Practical suggestions and research questions are proposed based on the relationships among scripts, meetings, and broader organizational processes.

Group Support Systems: Overview and Guided Tour

In recent years, collaboration has been of increasing importance in almost all organizations. Meetings are a common form of collaboration, be they face-to-face or virtual. Unfortunately, there are many well-known problems with meetings such as group-think and conformity, rush to judgement, wasted time, poor decisions, and many others. Group Support Systems (GSS) are one of several information technologies that have been designed to support and improve collaboration and decisionmaking. Since their inception in the early 1980s, GSSs have been used to enhance group processes and decision outcomes in thousands of meetings. Typical GSS software provides tools for idea generation, discussion and organization, and evaluation. Evaluation approaches can include sophisticated techniques such as multi-criteria decision analysis. This chapter reviews the history of GSS development and use, discusses the research literature, and provides a guided tour of one GSS that has been in continuous use for over 25 years.

Current status of information technologies used in support of task-oriented collaboration

Many organizations use information technology (IT) as a way to enable global networking, group negotiations, and expertise sharing amongst end-users in distributed work environments. IT can potentially play a significant role in effective and efficient negotiation and collaboration if it can enhance the quality of communication and coordination between group members asynchronously or synchronously. The paper empirically assesses the pattern of deployment of IT in task-oriented collaboration in US organizations. Data collected from one hundred and nineteen organizations is analyzed to gain insights into adoption and use patterns, and the benefits of seven popular IT approaches that have the capability to support collaboration and negotiation between workgroup members. Our analyses show that e-mail and audio teleconferencing are the most widely adopted and used technologies, while Web-based tools and electronic meeting systems (EMS) have the lowest level of adoption and use. Implications of these findings are discussed, along with some directions for practice and research.

Applying Group Support Systems in Social Work Education and Practice

SUMMARY This article describes an electronic tool or process called Meeting Works™, which supports and arguably improves human service staff meetings. Meeting Works™ has been shown to be effective with action planning, focus groups, project planning, quality initiatives, and a number of other activities associated with the human services.

An Exploratory Investigation of the Organizational Impacts of Collaborative Information Technology Utilization in Australian Organizations

In this paper, we extend the existing literature by exploring the organizational-level impacts of Collaborative Information Technology (CIT). We consider CIT as any information technology (IT) that supports collaboration tasks. Data was collected from 73 organizations in Australia to access organizational impacts of CITs. Our results indicate that CIT use for primary collaborative tasks (information and knowledge sharing, decision-making, report writing/information pooling), secondary collaborative tasks (communications, scheduling, and monitoring progress), and tertiary collaborative tasks (issue resolution and discussion and brainstorming) is positively and significantly associated with strategic, efficiency-oriented, and effectiveness-oriented organizational level impacts. Implications of our findings are discussed for practice and research.

Using group support systems for program evaluation in a state agency

Many government agencies find themselves under increasing pressure to demonstrate that the services they provide are valued by their citizen clients, and to show that they (the agencies) are continually improving their services and are responsive to client suggestions. These agencies must make their case to increasingly skeptical state legislatures. Client feedback sessions can be one way to meet this challenge, and group support systems (GSS) can be an effective way to manage the feedback sessions. The paper describes the case of the International Marketing Program in the Washington State Department of Agriculture that used a GSS to run a series of client feedback sessions around the state. The session participants and the agency staff evaluated the use of GSS using a questionnaire. The paper describes the case, summarized the questionnaire results, discusses the advantages and disadvantages of GSS use, and presents some lessons learned for future GSS projects.

Growth, decline, or metamorphosis?

The first day of the Second International Symposium on New Problems of Advanced Societies held from May 3 to 7, 1976, in Hamburg, was devoted to “Basic Political and Social Problems of the 1980’s”. In the following article those problems are traced back to a number of fundamental failures. Their removal requires, in the authors’ view, a thoroughgoing societal transformation. Subsequently we publish a contribution by Professor Bernard Cazes that also represents an excerpt from his report at the Symposium.