Supporting management teams
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Supporting management teams Using AIDA to segment the burgeoning market ¡n groupware
Jim Bryant The classification of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) highlights present and potential areas of development. In this article a classifying framework ¡s generated using the AIDA approach, which leads to a new way of portraying the characteristics
ergonomics, organisational behaviour, linguistics, social psychology and anthropology. This melding of ideas, together with the rapid development of related information technologies make CSCW an exciting field. Personally, I experienced the same 'buzz' and sense of youthful freshness at CSCW92,
value in determining the applicability of particular GDSS to given tasks, group configurations and
as I recall at OR conferences twenty years and more
of GDSS. This taxonomy is applied to show its working settings.
Jim Manzi of Lotus Development Corporation recent-
ly summarised ongoing change in organisational management as follows:
Organisations are going through massive change. Layers of management are being peeled away, replaced by teams of people assembled on an ad-hoc, project or task basis.
Teams are created according to the need at hand, then dismantled. Team members are selected based on expertise, not title. Teams are
not rooted in any particular location. They are mobile, either physically or electronically. Voice, data and video communication networks unite far flung team members.
Supporting these developments, he contrasted the new focus of computing for groups of people, with
the 'personal computer' emphasis of the 1980s. There can be no doubt that these changes have massive ¡mplication for OR practice.
ago. At the same time, CSCW is (like OR) bedevilled with detinitïonal problems. These rise from the two particles of the term: 'computer supported' and 'cooperative work', for is not all work (though carried out by individuals) socially organised, and is not the support tool an arbitrary delimiter (consider 'papersupported' as an alternative)? The most satisfying proposal to date is that CSCW is best seen as a new
paradigm for computer support for system design, And it is from this perspective that I shall proceed here.
In one field at least. that of Group Dccision Support (GDS), OR workers ae already grappling with the problems of providing effective and relevant assist ance to teams managing operations and shaping strategies in organisations of all types. A series of
occasional articles in this journal, launched by a review of GDSS (Finlay and Marples, 1991) has illustrated this stream of development, and the embedded methodologies. This article sets this work in the wider context of support for collaborative
activity, with a particular focus upon Computer
Support Cooperative Work (CSCW) and the Groupware products which this may involve
Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) as
Supported groupwork
major international CSCW conference took place in 1986, and it was as recently as 1992 that the first
There is nothing new about groupworking. What
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