GROUP DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: AN ANALYSIS AND CRITIQUE
Liam J. Bannon
Interaction Design Centre
University of Limerick, Ireland
liam.bannon@ul.ie
Abstract
This paper outlines and critiques a number of assumptions built into many current group decision support systems (GDSSs). It takes as exemplary the extensive work of the Arizona MIS group, and provides a critique of several assumptions embedded in this approach. The paper argues for a more nuanced understanding of meeting processes, and of participants’ frames of reference, than is apparent in current approaches. The intent of the paper is not simply to critique a specific conceptual framework, but to re-frame certain key concerns in the field of technology support for groups.
1. INTRODUCTION
This paper raises a number of issues concerning the conceptual framework underpinning much work in the area of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) and suggests several topics for further research. The intent of the paper is not simply to critique certain approaches but to re-frame certain key concerns in the field of decision support, and more specifically, group decision support. Much of the work in the DSS area has tended to rely on a conception of individual problem-solving and decision making heavily influenced by ideas from cognitive psychology, especially the work of Herb Simon, who in his own work, and subsequent collaborations with Allen Newell, developed a comprehensive framework for understanding problem-solving activity - involving notions of representations of problem spaces, and search strategies through these problem spaces. In this approach, people are viewed as information processing mechanisms, and decisions are made by people making rational choices between differently weighted alternatives.
While subsequent work, by Simon himself, developed the concept of "bounded rationality" so as to account for the fact that human decision makers could not always be modeled as having perfect information, or utilizing optimal strategies, this particular view of decision making as an aspect of problem-solving, of problem-solving as consisting of search through state spaces, of humans as information processors, etc., coupled with a number of conceptions about homo economicus concerning maximization of expected utility, preference functions, etc. has held sway for almost half a century in the cognitive science field. The upshot of this work has been a generally accepted set of conventions about how people make decisions, and about the way in which information systems might "support" this process through providing access to the appropriate kinds and levels of information and problem representations that decision-makers require in order to be able to make good decisions. The research work undertaken by this programme has covered such areas as studies of behavioural decision making, the development of appropriate models, and the improvement of the quality of the interaction between the user and the information systems artefact. While accepting the important contribution of this grand programme to our collective understanding of how people think and act in the world, it is important to note that this perspective, like all others, is open to criticism, and has its blindnesses.
The move towards group DSSs stems from an awareness that decision-making is often a group phenomenon, and thus computer support for communication and the integration of multiple inputs in DSSs is required. The interest in GDSS stems in part from the increasing interest in the area of technological support for groups, which can be seen in a variety of other research areas - for example human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), and organizational design - in recent years. While there are a variety of different kinds of GDSS systems in existence, both experimental and commercial, our focus here will be on a class of GDSSs often referred to as Electronic Meeting Systems (EMSs). Such systems have received a lot of attention of late, in both the information systems and the organizational literature. The settings for such systems can range from the very specialized - such as the early rooms configured for the University of Arizona work, and the London School of Economics "Pod" room - which can cost many thousands of pounds to equip with special workstations, computers and group displays, configured work surfaces, modifiable lighting, etc. through to ordinary meeting rooms, where portable PCs can be set-up on a local area network in minutes and be ready for use. The tools usually include some support for different phases of group activity, such as idea generation and selection, and various decision models. While some GDSSs can be used by the group on a "stand-alone" basis, in the majority of cases they require a meeting facilitator who helps the group in the development of the meeting agenda, and in the use of appropriate tools for the group activities. Some well known systems include the University of Minnesota SAMM system, the University of Michigan's ?? Capture Lab, the University of Arizona spin-offs GroupSystems marketed by Ventana, as well as the version called TeamFocus by IBM, and VisionQuest marketed by Collaborative Technologies Corporation.
Much published GDSS work perseveres with the widely accepted rational cognitive model of decision making activity previously described in this paper, with a concern for understanding the decision making process, basically still individual cognition, but with the proviso that now there are multiple people - a group - that is involved in the decision, requiring some attention to "group process". As an exemplar of this approach, for further discussion, I will refer to the work of Jay Nunamaker and his many colleagues at the University of Arizona, who have been involved in the development of GDSSs for a number of years. Out of this work initially came the software tool PLEXSYS, then the commercial system GroupSystems V, sold by Ventana Corporation, and a related system marketed by IBM known as TeamFocus. The system consists of a number of different tools that are intended to assist in aspects of the group decision-making process. There is support for brainstorming activity, for ranking alternative choices and voting on them, for preserving anonymity, etc. Focus has been on the support of co-located real-time teams, but the technology can be adapted for use in remote situations or for non-real-time use. There have been numerous studies conducted on the system, both in the laboratory and, more recently, field settings (Nunamaker, Dennis, Valacich, Vogel, & George, 1991). Indeed part of the reason why this work in particular is referenced in this paper is precisely because it is so well-documented and the widespread availability of commercial versions of this system. However, it is important to note that much of the critique developed here applies with equal force to many other GDSSs.
The conceptual framework which is used by the University of Arizona research group to support their claims is based on a model that comprises four major factors that are seen as contingently involved in the use of EMSs - these are labeled group, task, context and technology factors. Thus group factors include such issues as size, proximity, composition, cohesiveness etc. Task factors involve the nature of the particular task - brainstorming, decision making, complexity etc. Context factors include such things as - organizational culture, time pressures, evaluative tone of meeting, and the reward structure. Obviously different kinds of technology, and the quality of the interfaces, the familiarity of the technology to the meeting participants, etc., will also have some effect on the meeting process and outcomes. The research framework also identifies a set of four conceptual mechanisms by which one can analyze meetings. These are, briefly:
Process Support - focusing on the communication infrastructure and its support for such features as parallel communication, group memory, anonymity;
Process Structure - focusing on the rules that direct patterns of activity, e.g. by providing agendas for meetings, or implementing specific forms of turn taking protocols;
Task support - refers to the information and computational infrastructure that supports the accomplishment of the actual task, e.g. - external databases, spreadsheets, organizational memory elements;
Task structure - refers to the techniques, rules, and models available to the group for analyzing task-related information, akin to the DSS models used by individual decision makers.
It is within this espoused framework that the Arizona research group discuss GDSS, and perform experiments to tease out the contributions of certain identified factors to the overall effectiveness of the group decision making process. Some of the major advantages of the system claimed by the developers, collated from their publications, include the following:
° people work on the system in parallel, so it is possible to get a lot more ideas into circulation and captured quickly using the system during brainstorming
° since the input is anonymous, there is equal opportunity for participation by all at the meeting, unencumbered with power or status differentials
° the system purportedly enables larger group meetings to be effective through control of the process
° the system permits the group to choose between a variety of techniques
° the system offers access to external information sources that can be utilized in the group decision process more easily and effectively
° the system supports development of an organizational memory, by keeping a record of the inputs of the participants during the meeting, and of the choices made.
° use of the system in a number of organizations have lead to significant productivity gains based on much shorter lead times for getting decisions made in large groups through use of the system.
These are interesting and impressive claims, and they are backed up by reference to a large number of studies conducted by the group in their laboratory over a number of years. Despite this apparent vindication of their approach, I believe that there are a number of serious questions that can be raised about the interpretation of this work, and the general applicability of these findings. Since examples of this work are widely available, I will not go through an account of the details of their studies here, but progress directly to a commentary and critique of the underlying assumptions of this approach, of the methodology, and of the interpretation of the empirical results. The purpose of this exercise is to highlight a number of important issues concerning decision-making and general mediational processes in organizations which tend to be ignored or insufficiently acknowledged in this approach to the support of group processes.
2. A CRITIQUE OF GDSS
It is important to note that, even within the GDSS field, there is no uniformity of opinion as to what is the best approach to the development and use of GDSS (Stohr and Konsynski, 1992). What has been briefly described above is however a prototypical example of work in the field that has received widespread exposure and so is a legitimate target for analysis and critique. As Whitaker (1992, 1994) has cogently argued, much of the work in GDSS has focused on “collecting unit elements, organizing and arranging these units, and voting or ranking them”. Such activities do not circumscribe the range of activities that are important at meetings. Specifically, they ignore or relegate to minor importance such crucial aspects of the meeting process as the initial environmental collation of information, generation of options and concurrent initial interpretation phase, which serve as the very basis or context for all subsequent activities. There is a large body of work from a number of systems perspectives that would consider GDSS as consisting of four major stages, viz. 1) Recognition of a need or problem ; 2) Generation of some context for evaluation; 3) Evaluation of actions/consequences ; 4) Selection of an action. Whitaker and many others point out that many current GDSSs ignore, or provide minimal support for, Stage 1, and much of Stage 2, focusing instead on Stages 3 and 4. As a consequence, there is too much focus on the selection stage, and insufficient time given to understanding the context of the different options. The outcomes of such an approach are serious. Since there is little room for discussion amongst the participants concerning the grounds on which information is deemed relevant to the task at hand, this model implicitly imposes a set of normative assumptions on the nature of the meeting process. Again, if I may refer directly to Whitaker, who has I believe presented this argument most starkly in recent years, the implications of this approach are the following (Whitaker, 1992:36):
" ° all parties to the decision process are operating with respect to a presumably common ontological foundation
° all parties are capable of submitting ontologically comparable unit options for consideration
° all parties are capable of manipulating these ontologically comparable unit options under conditions of epistemological equivalence during consideration.
° all parties are capable of conducting their epistemologically equivalent data manipulations under conditions of uniform rationality."
While the language and terminology employed by Whitaker may seem unnecessarily abstruse, the points being made are of crucial importance. Both Whitaker and I would dispute the veracity of these assumptions for the majority of meetings, though they are held by many in the GDSS field. A simple aggregation and selection of options may be defensible where collaborators are uniformly knowledgeable on the background to the problem, issues, etc. at hand. However, it is unlikely to be sufficient in cases where we are dealing with actors having differential knowledge, for example, in dealing with multidisciplinary teams or indeed, the majority of situations, where a crucial component of the meeting should involve dialogue and discussion about the nature of the events to be debated and decided on, what counts as evidence, etc.. In these cases, formulating the very task itself may form an essential aspect of the meeting. It is in the “support” of such aspects of meetings that current GDSSs fall down. Let us now look in more detail at a number of the problems thus encountered by current GDSSs.
2.1 Ontology
As noted by a number of commentators, the work of meetings is often not simply about making decisions about items on the agenda, but querying the very makeup of the agenda and ascertaining whether the language used to describe topics is held in common among the members of the group at the meeting. What one person means by a term of phrase is commonly found not to be the same as what others might mean by the same term or phrase. It is this latter issue that is of concern to us here. The problem is often either pushed under the carpet by the assumption of shared views on the part of the meeting convenor, or else an attempt is made to reconcile possible differences through the establishment of some form of prescribed common dictionary of concepts that all must follow. This latter approach has its difficulties, as have been enumerated for a variety of work contexts in a number of papers (Robinson & Bannon, 1991, Schmidt, 1991, Davenport, 1994). While Robinson and Bannon were looking at the problems of “ontological drift” as designs move between groups during the systems development process, the underlying issues raised in that paper are fundamental to the point under discussion here (Robinson & Bannon, 1991):
“Different groups, professions, and subcultures embody different perspectives. They communicate in different "jargon". Much of this cannot be translated in a satisfactory way into terms used by other groups, since it reflects a different way of acting in the world (a different ontology and epistemology). Distinct groups of this sort will be referred to as semantic communities. The problem is not resolved by promoting the necessity of open communication -- since this assumes the different groups can be framed in a single semantic world. The meaning of terms is not transparent across groups.. "
Schmidt (1991) cites Savage (1987) on a similar point: "...each functional department has its own set of meanings for key terms....Key terms such as part, project, subassembly, tolerance are understood differently in different parts of the company" (Savage, 1987). Likewise, Davenport (1994) notes: “No matter how simple or basic a unit of information may seem, there can be valid disagreements about its meaning” and provides several examples from the business world. In such a situation the task of the group in a decision process is not simply "getting it right", as there may be no clear "right" answer. Rather the group must come to some accommodation about the differing world views of the participants, and about the adequacy of the models they employ in their decision process. As Gerson and Star (1986) note: "No representation ..... is either complete or permanent. Rather any description is a snapshot of historical processes in which differing viewpoints, local contingencies and multiple interests have been temporarily reconciled." Many current GDSS systems do not address this fundamental issue, although there have been some attempts to surface the differing assumptions and perspectives among group members and make them visible and malleable ( e.g. the cognitive mapping work of Eden and his colleagues, and the work of Boland and his colleagues (1992) on software to represent different participant's perspectives).
2.2 Politics
The MIS and DSS literature is replete with discussions of conceptual frameworks and resulting software applications that fail in use due to the lack of attention paid to “political” aspects of the problem under study. Too often, the assumption is made that information is a neutral concept. As March (1991) notes: “Most information is subject to strategic misrepresentation or unconscious bias”. Such observations assume special importance when we come to discuss the “sharing” of information for the purpose of discussion and decision-making. Apart from the difficulties adumbrated above concerning the potentially different and divisive ontologies of the actors who produce and use the information, information is a strategic resource that will be jealously guarded by owner-actors and used in carefully circumscribed ways at meetings. The failure to take into account the political perspective creates many problems for the utilization of information and information technology among certain groups. In the area of EMSs, Grudin (1989) describes how a particular GDSS - gIBIS - which was being used by a group to provide a group memory, representing arguments for and against certain design decisions, was thrown out by the manager of the group, who was afraid that such an instantiation and reification of the disagreements within his group might be used inappropriately by others in the organization! Similarly, Lyytinen et al. (1994) in their insightful analysis of diplomatic meeting protocols, note how at many junctures in this complex process the archival properties of a GDSS would preclude its actual use!
2.3. The importance of “talk”
One of the surprising features of a number of the available GDSSs is their lack of support for conversations among the group members. Whereas certain views on what meetings are about would give primacy to such discussions among participants, this does not seem to be the case for many researchers in the field. In some cases, group discussion tends to be tightly controlled and orchestrated by the facilitator, who tries to re-focus attention on individual member’s tasks at their workstation. In such cases, participants at the meeting often report a feeling of dissociation from others, due to the lack of interaction allowed at the meeting. As Whitaker notes, the group are “co-located, yet remote”(Whitaker, 1994). A recent report (Docherty, 1992) provides explicit documentation of these concerns by a number of meeting participants. They experienced the system as constraining: they felt that the system had too heavy an emphasis on hierarchically-organized meetings with the facilitator in control, where there were constraints on interpersonal communication caused by the temptation to focus on the individual workstation, thus leading to a rather impersonal setting where people felt they were acting individually. They also felt that the exclusion of non-symbolic aspects of communication reduced the effectiveness of the meeting.
In situations where some direct interaction between the participants is allowed, the group discussion that does take place happens completely outside the information technology! While in and of itself, this need not necessarily be a problem, it does cause some difficulty for those who argue that the GDSS is specifically designed to capture the meeting process and form an organizational memory. The majority of GDSSs neither support the discussions about the topics entered into the system, nor do they provide any record of any such discussions that may have gone on around the material on the screens. As an example, (Whitaker, 1992) recounts how when the members of the group “broke ranks” and spoke to each other about how to co-ordinate their activities though the system only the results of the decision went into the group memory, i.e. the argumentation and discussion about the topic was not captured or marked in any way in the GDSS. Thus much in the way of background context for the decisions taken by the group - the efforts at sense making and attempts to come to a common understanding of the items depicted in the system - were not preserved in the system, and not available subsequently to others who might wish to review this meeting process at a later date. This poses the question of exactly to what extent do these supposed group support systems actually support the work of the group?
Reflecting on the situation, there appears to be an assumption that too much time at meetings is taken up by "idle talk”, and that the preparation of an agenda and the pacing of the meeting via the facilitator and software tools will improve effectiveness. If we believe that meetings are a place where different social worlds interact, where there is an attempt to understand each others’ perspectives on problems, then it would appear that more rather than less emphasis should be given to supporting conversation between members of the group. To reduce oral communication to textual messages on screens does not on the face of it appear to be a way of enhancing group process. As Whitaker (1992) perspicuously notes: “...the very sort of dialogue current GDSS overlook or relegate to external channels is the very element introduced in shifting information technology support from individual decision makers(DSS) to groups (GDSS)”. There appears to be an assumption that what conversation -talk - consists of is simply a series of messages by one person followed by responses from another. Such a view of conversation is known to be far from accurate. Due to the work of conversation analysts and others, we have become aware of the richly nuanced ways in which speaker and hearer “co-produce” their utterances. Making sense of each other is not given a priori. This is admirably described in the following quote from McDermott, Gospodinoff, & Aron (1978).
"In addition to sharing knowledge about each other, and whatever it is they are doing together, actors .... struggle to make sense of each other and do work to help generate the kinds of recognizable contexts for common sense to be achieved from one moment to the next. As Garfinkel .... has pointed out often, the problem facing people in interaction is never simply one of shared knowledge or overlapping interpretive grids. No matter how much people know in common, they must still work at constructing the environments that their mutual knowledge leads them to expect, and any relaxation of this effort can have disastrous consequences. People never know exactly how to make sense of each other. "
Thus, current GDSSs do not adequately support participants’ needs for creating a shared or common information space through conversational interaction. They embody a model of conversation that is at odds with current research on human communication.
2. 4. The nature of "groups"
The ‘group’ concept in GDSS is problematic on a number of grounds. Firstly, there is little consistency in the use of the term across research groups and practitioners. In some cases, it would appear that groups are characterised by a number of specific properties, for example, that all members are homogeneous, of equal status, engage in frequent face-to-face contact, share a common goal, etc. Yet others seem to use the term for any agglomeration of people. Secondly, even on the rare occasions when real world groups are investigated, there is an emphasis on studying small, integrated, focused teams, with a well specified shared goal, which again is hardly representative of the way people work collectively in many settings. As Lyytinen et al. (1994) note:
“--- the conception of a small cohesive team with fixed participants, a clear task, and shared goals is not necessarily appropriate in informing the design and examination of all EMS systems. Groups are not always small, their participants come and go, their goals are neither shared nor existing, and their tasks can be ambiguous, and under constant shift and drift.”
Investigating actual work situations, we discover that there are a variety of ways in which people work together, but that many of them do not conform to any of the images of “group” work. We should not restrict the scope of GDSSs to those cases where the responsibility of performing a task has been allocated to, or assumed by, a relatively closed and fixed collective (Schmidt & Bannon, 1992).
2.5. The appropriateness of research methodologies
While a large number of empirical studies are cited by GDSS researchers in support of their claims, many of them need to be treated with caution, due to a number of limitations of the published studies. Critiques of the studies come from those within the DSS community as well as outside. For example, a recent (G)DSS review book accepts that almost all published DSS studies have been laboratory bound, often with students as subjects and argue that: “We must begin to study real people in real settings working on real tasks”(Elam et al., 1992:69). In sum, they comment, and I would agree strongly:
"Specific laboratory studies have been criticized because they use student groups and artificial tasks rather than ongoing groups that have decisions to make that are of importance to the group; they usually involve only a single meeting; they assume that the particular GDSS and experimental situation are representative and can be used to draw conclusions about all GDSS; they focus on changes in outcomes and individual satisfaction, but not on changes in group process or group dynamics, and they differ only slightly, typically in one or two variables being set at different levels, from previous experiments." (Gray et al., 1992:83)
To be fair, in more recent work, researchers have begun to study real groups involved in more realistic scenarios, so that this criticism is no longer as valid as in earlier times.
2.6. Claims of efficiency/effectiveness
One of the claimed benefits of GDSSs are that they decrease the time spent on meetings significantly, and lead to greater satisfaction on the part of the group members. It can be difficult to assess the validity of these claims, as often the comparison is made between "time taken to reach a decision with the system" versus "people's estimate of how long it would have taken to make the decision without the specific technology". Such estimations are difficult to validate. Much has been made of the increased efficiency of groups using meeting systems through the ability of each group member to input ideas in parallel via the computer system, rather than engage in sequential turn-taking as in a face-to-face meeting situation. The very idea that this sort of parallel brainstorming is effective, in the sense that it produces (collectively) better ideas is, however, open to question (Hoffman, 1978). Secondly, the focus of these measures is in terms of quantitative "units of ideas" produced, with little focus on the qualitative dimensions of the concepts. Thirdly, the dialogue directed toward analyzing or critiquing the atomic "ideas" themselves remains outside the shared information space that is produced: “In GroupSystems, brainstorming is performed by a group but not as a group” (Whitaker, 1992). Granted, this method does produce a lot of material, but then again, there is a trade-off between the individual production of text and the time taken to read and evaluate it all by the whole group, as described in Docherty (1992).Also, as noted by Lyytinen et al. (1994), reduction in meeting time is often too simplistic an output measure. Indeed, depending on the kind of meeting, they comment how it may be the way in which the “idle time” between meetings is managed by the meeting organizers that can significantly affect the final meeting outcome, rather than what happens in the meeting per se.
2.7. Benefits of anonymity
Again, the claims made for the benefits of anonymity needs some qualification. While undoubtedly there are cases where there are benefits, it is also the case that there are many exceptions. Reduced user identity can be dysfunctional in certain settings, as noted by Lyytinen et al. (1994). In many situations, it is crucial to know who says what, as not all members at the meeting are perceived as equally competent. Anonymity is also counterproductive in situations where specific individuals are necessarily linked to given positions or where the goal is "sharing personal perspectives” between the group members.
3. CONCLUDING REMARKS: SOME QUESTIONS FOR THE GDSS COMMUNITY
The rational model of decision making inherent in the work discussed above is just one view of the world, and could, and should be challenged, debated, and supplemented. Much turns on how one approaches such concepts as “decision-making” in organizations, i.e. whether one narrowly delimits the field of inquiry to a particular category of actions and settings, or whether one accepts that in the end, most work activities throughout an organization involve sense-making, interpretation, and, yes, occasionally decision-making. Might it not be of interest to investigate how other frameworks view the world of business, management and “decisions”? Such approaches as hermeneutics and phenomenology may re-frame some thorny issues, and allow for new insights and understandings, for both the actors involved, and the researchers (see, for example, Preston, 1991). There is a need for further research in such areas as - the limits of user models, the creation of user languages, the construction of shared spaces and the enrichment of mechanisms of interaction to serve as means for cooperation between people. Again, one of the strengths of the ethnomethodological programme that has been visible, for example, in the field of CSCW has been its detailed and insightful accounts of how work gets done in organizations, as these accounts include descriptions and interpretations of local problem solving and decision making. It would be a worthwhile exercise to organize a workshop between GDSS researchers, behavioural decision-making researchers and sociological researchers in CSCW to discuss their varied understandings of meeting processes, settings and outcomes. How do we reconcile their at times competing visions of how decisions are made? To what extent are groups as traditionally conceptualized, relevant to modern business functioning? Can we reconcile the results of studies done on group process in the lab with what seems to happen within organizations? Might we do better if we understand how decision making is actually occurring in organizations, in a distributed fashion, rather than in some centralized fashion?
How people interact and manage conversation in meetings is a complex skill, and if technology is to “support” this process it would appear to require richer models of communication embedded in it that is currently the case in some of the (G)DSSs that we have mentioned. More generally, there is the question of what kinds of meeting are such systems appropriate for? In situations where the group agrees on the general framework of important factors in the decision-making process, then the system may indeed speed up the process, but in situations where the major topic of the meeting is arguing about the very grounds for making the decision, it is not likely that the rather simple model of decision-making embodied in these systems is appropriate. While not denying that the use of GDSSs can have positive outcomes, I believe that there is a need to examine some of the stated claims carefully. Much of the current GDSS work assumes a particular worldview which has been called into question in the work cited here. The suggestion is that a number of central concepts utilized in the GDSS literature need further scrutiny to assess their adequacy. Concomitantly, there is a need for a wider range of methodologies to be employed in the empirical studies of use of these GDSSs. Perhaps further investigation of how currently available GDSSs are actually used in practice could help us in understanding how people appropriate tools and also provide new insights for design (cf. Poole & DeSanctis, 1989). Creative misuse, or unanticipated use, can certainly provoke reflection and redesign (Mackay, 1990). The literature on the details of actual use of GDSSs is still quite sparse. Certainly, studies of use meeting systems by members other than the design team can produce striking results, as witnessed by the study on the Xerox PARC CoLab (Tatar, Foster & Bobrow, 1991). The pooling of experiences of use by both the CSCW and GDSS communities would be of great interest, as currently, even in CSCW, there is a dearth of such evaluative field studies (Bannon, 1996). The role of the support system in the context of the group task and context also needs to be investigated. For example, one of the facilitators who used (G)DSSs extensively once confided to me how meetings where the technology played a secondary role, i.e. the focus is on the meeting conversations, with only intermittent use of the “support” technology, tended to be the ones perceived by the group as most satisfactory. So perhaps we need to reduce the emphasis on the structuring aspects of the technology and the special-purpose setting throughout the meeting, and investigate its selective use. Another developer of GDSSs confided how, over time, through reflecting on many instances of use, he realized that the key features facilitating the meeting process concerned aspects of process facilitation and mediating activities, rather than being due to features of the artifacts employed or the “high-tech” setting. What this implies for the whole concept of ‘group support systems’ is a moot point. Perhaps it would simply take away some of the fascination for large scale technical fixes for what are ultimately social problems, and encourage the development of simpler, more convivial computerized tools that can be picked up and discarded at will by the group participants during their meetings.
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