Sustaining the Army Training Mission by Re-thinking Decision Support Systems: Shifting from Decision-making Individuals to Sense-making Agents

Decision Support Systems (DSS), as computerized systems that implement and support complex decision processes, have evolved significantly during the last four decades. However, this evolution has been dominantly bottom-up and technology-driven, with new emerging technologies supporting the traditional concept of decision making as a basically rational process (Simon 1960). In an effort to reconceptualize decision making, this paper follows a top-down approach, starting with a new conceptual framework and then exploring the technologies and tools that can support it. To this end, the paper proposes four major conceptual shifts: a pragmatic shift from problems in the mind to problematic situations in the world, a constructive shift from passive decision making to active sense making, a normative shift from accuracy and certainty to plausibility and transparency, and a technical shift in our understanding of technology as enabler to technology as transformer of human activity. These shifts are in harmony with current theoretical trends in DSS and related disciplines — e.g., the growing emphasis on multiple perspectives in DSS, on multi-agent systems in Artificial Intelligence, on distributed cognition in psychology, and on sense making in organization science (Weick 1995, 2001). By focusing our attention on the collective, distributed, and constructive character of cognition, the framework that results from these shifts provides a useful way of thinking about DSS. Furthermore, ideas from science and technology studies portray a tightly interwoven picture of technologies and their social and organizational context, which is very different from the traditional view of technologies as mere tools. Brought to the realm of DSS, this calls for a fresh look at the relationship between information technologies and decision-making processes.