COMPUTER-BASED SUPPORT OF ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION MAKING (original) (raw)

The central issue of this research is the extent to which computer facilities can be used to support organizational decision-making processes beyond mere performance of information retrieval. This depends upon the extent to which computers can be made to emulate human perceptual and judgmental processes. We present a framework for understanding these Cognitive processes and exaTine how it applies to organizational decisions. Moreover, the framework furnishes a basis for the design of a generalized, intelligent problem processor. This processor is general in the sense of its ability to support a decision maker's activities, regardless of the decision maker's application area (e.g., urban planning, water-quality planning, etc.). It is intelligent in the sense of its ability to comprehend English-like queries and subsequently formulate models, interface appropriate data with those models, and execute the models to produce some facts or expectations about the problem under consideration.