Remote decision support system: a distributed information management system

This last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of the 'Information Socie ty', in which most of the production domains are strictly dependent on acce ss to information. "What is becoming more and more obvious is that access t o information alone is not the answer. What European citizen's need are the skills and tools to enable to rum that information into knowledge" [L. Rod riguez-Rosello, Telematics in Education and Training: Trendsand Visions, NT ICF'98, Insa-Rouen, http://www.insa-rouen.fr/, 1998]. The use of New Techno logies of Information and Communication (NTIC) has deeply changed the organ isation and the practice of decision support systems. The number and cost o f meetings necessary to achieve any consensus have been significantly on th e rise. The increased use of Internet and multimedia facilities has encoura ged the development of interactive online decision support systems. NTIC fa cilities have also stimulated the development of co-operative decision supp ort systems. Nowadays, in order to make a decision, it is possible to use s everal types of expertise from the entire world. As a result, the number of decision-making partners needed to take part in a decision is constantly i ncreasing. Today, within this open knowledge world, the organisational task of such me etings becomes a problem in itself. Every meeting today implies that a deci sion may be made. Thus, the presence of most of the decision-makers becomes essential and the complexity of agenda management increases. In this artic le, we present a simple case study to illustrate the shifting of decision a nd communication support system. Through this trivial example we show once again that: rational solutions are not always to be retained; information flow contains very useful knowledge to be discovered. Finally we describe the architecture of a "skill based decision system" aim ing at helping the organisation of meetings. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.