Reengineering the Group Decision-Making Process

Organisations, the world over are increasingly focussing their efforts on radical measures to enhance their competitive edge. One such area of interest focuses on reduction in the time taken in classical process of managerial group decision-making. The rapid strides made in the field of Information Technology have opened new opportunities to qualitatively enhance productivity of collaborative work. Group Decision Support System (GDSS) focuses on the aspect of introducing technology, in a graded manner, into the process of group decisionmaking. It seeks to fundamentally alter the angularities of such interaction and present a technology driven platform for the purpose. However, the basic process of group interaction needs to be more clearly understood before any wide-scale implementation of GDSS can prove beneficial. A model of the evolving GDSS process is presented which affords a framework for further research into the contemporary technology-driven collaborative process. It is proposed that the advent of IT offers a unique opportunity to re-engineer the group decision making processes so as to significantly benefit from the GDSS paradigm.