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Flexible decision support in dynamic inter-organisational networks

  • Special Section Article
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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

An effective Decision Support System (DSS) should help its users improve decision making in complex, information-rich environments. We present a feature gap analysis that shows that current decision support technologies lack important qualities for a new generation of agile business models that require easy, temporary integration across organisational boundaries. We enumerate these qualities as DSS Desiderata, properties that can contribute both effectiveness and flexibility to users in such environments. To address this gap, we describe a new design approach that enables users to compose decision behaviours from separate, configurable components, and allows dynamic construction of analysis and modelling tools from small, single-purpose evaluator services. The result is what we call an ‘evaluator service network’ that can easily be configured to test hypotheses and analyse the impact of various choices for elements of decision processes. We have implemented and tested this design in an interactive version of the MinneTAC trading agent, an agent designed for the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management.

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Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this paper (Collins et al., 2008) was presented at the Smart Business Network conference in Beijing, May 2008, and won the best paper award. Partial support for Maria Gini is gratefully acknowledged from the National Science Foundation under award NSF/IIS-0414466.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Minnesota, U.S.A.

    John Collins & Maria Gini

  2. Department of Decision and Information Sciences, RSM Erasmus University, the Netherlands

    Wolfgang Ketter

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  1. John Collins
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  2. Wolfgang Ketter
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  3. Maria Gini
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Correspondence to John Collins.

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Collins, J., Ketter, W. & Gini, M. Flexible decision support in dynamic inter-organisational networks. Eur J Inf Syst 19, 436–448 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2010.24

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