The Design and Implementation of a Flexible Web-based Decision System

We present a framework for the design of decision oriented systems in the current context of ubiquitous web technologies. The complexity of organisational decision making has rapidly escalated due to the volume and variety of inputs provided to decision makers. Two parallel streams of thought that have arisen to deal with the associated issues are (1) improving accessibility to organisational information through appropriate technologies and (2) having a strategy to manage knowledge that is distributed throughout an organisation. In our research, we employ these ideas in a component driven implementation of the framework. Our work reflects a merging of ideas from the areas of decision support, web based application design, and knowledge management strategy and is rooted in systems design. Central to our framework is the application of scenario based development which leverages the notion of persistent problem instances as an important component of applications. We demonstrate our ideas with a particular application of our implementation.