Decision-support tools: moving beyond a technical orientation

The very nature of decision making has been changed by the contemporary emphasis on sustainability. Organisations wishing to address the sustainability agenda must include a complex and complicated set of social, environmental and economic considerations in their deliberations. This paper begins with a literature review that describes the drivers for, and barriers to, the adoption of decision-support tools (DSTs). The design and execution of a scoping study focused on identifying and characterising such drivers and barriers are then reported. Findings suggest that the decision-making context is central to the adoption of DSTs and that organisations and their decision support systems (DSSs) need to embrace procedures that can deal with complexity and go beyond the technical orientation of previous tools.