Designing technology for managing the information exchange of decision making teams

• Ill-structured decision-making by teams is conceptualized in information exchange.
• A linear control system for the dynamics of information types is introduced.
• Team social structure and its biases are investigated in numerical exercises.
• Technology for managing information exchange to a quality maximizing path is reviewed.
• Capabilities of recent GDSSs to implement control variables in the system are described.

Ill-structured decision-making by teams is conceptualized in terms of information exchange. A linear system for the dynamics of information types is used to formulate “optimal” information exchange over time as a control problem. The control problem highlights issues in managing the exchange of evaluations across stage transitions in heuristic decision-making. The managerial problem is then extended to represent social structure in teams as a regulator of the amount and type of information that members exchange. A non-linear system in information exchange as mediated by the distribution of status among team members is defined and used in numerical exercises to examine parameter sensitivities. Finally, the technology of managing information exchange to follow a defined quality maximizing path is reviewed and the capabilities of recent GDSSs to implement the control variables in the conceptualization are described in detail.