Group Support Systems: Overview and Guided Tour

Abstract

In recent years, collaboration has been of increasing importance in almost all organizations. Meetings are a common form of collaboration, be they face-to-face or virtual. Unfortunately, there are many well-known problems with meetings such as group-think and conformity, rush to judgement, wasted time, poor decisions, and many others. Group Support Systems (GSS) are one of several information technologies that have been designed to support and improve collaboration and decisionmaking. Since their inception in the early 1980s, GSSs have been used to enhance group processes and decision outcomes in thousands of meetings. Typical GSS software provides tools for idea generation, discussion and organization, and evaluation. Evaluation approaches can include sophisticated techniques such as multi-criteria decision analysis. This chapter reviews the history of GSS development and use, discusses the research literature, and provides a guided tour of one GSS that has been in continuous use for over 25 years.