GIS-supported collaborative decision making: Results of an experiment

This article addresses research questions about the sociobehavioral dynamic s of geographic information system (GIS) use during collaborative decision making in small interorganizational groups. Using an experimental design of a conference room setting, a study of human-computer-human interaction was conducted with 109 volunteer participants formed into 22 groups, each grou p representing multiple organizational stakeholder perspectives. The experi ment involved the use of GIS integrated with multiple criteria decision mod els to support group-based decision making concerned with the selection of habitat restoration sites in the Duwamish Waterway of Seattle, Washington. Findings representative of four categories of investigation are presented. In the first category the experiment demonstrated that groups used maps pre dominantly to visualize the evaluation results and much less to structure/d esign the decision problem. Maps Flayed only a limited support role in vari ous decision stages of tile experiment. In the second category, while the u se of multiple criteria decision models by groups remained steady throughou t different phases of the decision process, the use of maps was much lower during the initial exploratory-structuring phase than during tile later ana lytic-integrating phase. In category three, the amount of prior and acquire d group member experience with computer tools had no influence on the appro priation of decision aids. In category four, different phases of the decisi on process had two different levels of conflict: the exploratory-structurin g phase was characterized by a lower level of conflict, and the analytic-in tegrating phase was characterized by high conflict level. Tile higher level of conflict during the analytic-integrating phase tells us that analytical decision aids aimed at conflict management are likely to help work through conflict, such conflict now being recognized as a necessary part of making progress in public decision problems.