Abstract

The increasing complexity of the current dynamic business environment makes some of centralized decision making either difficult or inefficient. While some attention has been paid to the dynamic distributed decision making (DDM), the research on decision support systems (DDS) supporting DDM is quite limited. In particular, how to model the structure of dynamic DDM and use information technology to support dynamic DDM remains as a critical question. In this thesis, from information processing prospective, we propose a conceptual model, i.e. integrated decision stations (IDS), to address how to support dynamic DDM. Our model is based on the decomposition of decision criteria and information flows. To demonstrate the applicability of this framework, we apply it to lead time management and illustrate it with a prototype. It shows that our framework is powerful to describe various scenarios of DDM. In addition, we conduct a simulation study to investigate the impacts of two distinct features of IDS, i.e. real-time information and information coordination, on the decision performance. The results partially support that both information delay and information coordination have significant impacts on decision performance. The contribution of our study is that it provides both practitioners and academic researchers with a comprehensive framework to design effective DDM support systems and study their impacts on decision performance