Collaborative Decision Making

This chapter introduces the collaborative decision making (CDM) framework as a means of employing a systematic approach to develop collaborative systems in an electronic business environment. It argues that the CDM framework provides a holistic view of the components that play critical roles for collaboration, which include group facilitation and coordination, knowledge repositories, dialectic decision support, and discussion strategy support. The framework emphasizes the importance of supporting dynamic collaboration across multiple aspects of the group decision making process as a basic requirement. This chapter identifies the major components of decision support functionalities that need to be embedded in CDM systems so as to reduce the cognitive burden of decision makers.