The Use of Communication Technologies in the Urgent Decision-Making Process: A Case Study of a New Zealand Public Sector Organisation

Within the literature on decision-making, information and communication technologies (ICT) and associated theories such as the Information Richness Theory (Daft and Lengel, 1986), there is little focus on the urgent decision-making process, particularly the role of ICT in these situations. This study examines how members of a senior management team in the New Zealand public sector make decisions under urgency. The purpose of this study is to provide a base for future studies in the area of ICT and the urgent decision-making process. This research was done via a qualitative, interpretive design utilising Critical Incident Interviewing Technique and open coding to see if and how the conventional decision-making process (Robbins, et al., 1998; Watson, 1987) differs under urgency and to evaluate how the current communication technologies are being used in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in this urgent decision-making process. Four Regional Managers geographically dispersed around New Zealand were interviewed either face-to-face or via telephone. This study tentatively suggests that only three full steps of the conventional decision-making process are used in the urgent decision-making process. Participants claimed that email would be used rarely, if at all, and that audio-conferencing had been dropped entirely. Although ICT is used in the urgent decision-making process, methods to improve the effectiveness need further investigation.