GIS-Supported Collaborative Decision Making: Results of an Experiment

This article addresses research questions about the sociobehavioral dynamics 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 group representing multiple organizational stakeholder perspectives. The experiment involved the use of GIS integrated with multiple criteria decision models 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 predominantly to visualize the evaluation results and much less to structure/design the decision problem. Maps played only a limited support role in various decision stages of the experiment. In the second category, while the use of multiple criteria decision models by groups remained steady throughout different phases of the decision process, the use of maps was much lower during the initial exploratory-structuring phase than during the later analytic-integrating phase. In category three, the amount of prior and acquired group member experience with computer tools had no influence on the appropriation of decision aids. In category four, different phases of the decision process had two different levels of conflict: the exploratory-structuring phase was characterized by a lower level of conflict, and the analytic-integrating phase was characterized by high conflict level. The 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.