Remote decision support system: a distributed information management system

摘要

This last decade, we have witnessed the emergence of the ‘Information Society’, in which most of the production domains are strictly dependent on access to information. “What is becoming more and more obvious is that access to information alone is not the answer. What European citizen's need are the skills and tools to enable to turn that information into knowledge” [L. Rodriguez-Rosello, Telematics in Education and Training: Trendsand Visions, NTICF’98, Insa-Rouen, http://www.insa-rouen.fr/, 1998]. The use of New Technologies of Information and Communication (NTIC) has deeply changed the organisation and the practice of decision support systems. The number and cost of meetings necessary to achieve any consensus have been significantly on the rise. The increased use of Internet and multimedia facilities has encouraged the development of interactive online decision support systems. NTIC facilities have also stimulated the development of co-operative decision support systems. Nowadays, in order to make a decision, it is possible to use several types of expertise from the entire world. As a result, the number of decision-making partners needed to take part in a decision is constantly increasing.Today, within this open knowledge world, the organisational task of such meetings becomes a problem in itself. Every meeting today implies that a decision may be made. Thus, the presence of most of the decision-makers becomes essential and the complexity of agenda management increases. In this article, we present a simple case study to illustrate the shifting of decision and communication support system. Through this trivial example we show once again that:•rational solutions are not always to be retained;•information flow contains very useful knowledge to be discovered.Finally we describe the architecture of a “skill based decision system” aiming at helping the organisation of meetings.