Context-Sensitive Decision Support Systems

In today’s rapidly changing educational and business climate, organizational transformation has become a key area of development for many different and varied environments, both commercial and academic. This book addresses issues related to developing Decision Support Systems (DSS) which are sensitive and adaptable to different contexts and evolving technical and work environments. In addition to addressing the various cultural/social, organizational/individual, task/technology contexts of DSS, the book also anchors these discussions in a practical context, drawing on case studies to illustrate the theoretical dimensions stressed. This text includes the following issues: frameworks for understanding the contexts and environments of decision support; cases and issues in decision support and organizational transformation in context; an inter-disciplinary analysis of DSS, covering a wide variety of situations; and real-world applications of DSS. It contains selected papers presented and discussed at the International Conference on Context-Sensitive Decision Support Systems, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Bled, Slovenia in July 1998. The book should prove valuable to anyone working in information and decision support systems development, management, implementation and evaluation, as well as to researchers/practitioners in organizational analysis and development, management and business administration, sociology and psychology of organizations, human relations and human factors management.