Evaluating the Interfaces and Interactions between Decision Makers and Decision Support and Information Systems in Electronic Business to Improve Decision Maker Effectiveness

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Research in human-computer systems, a subset of Industrial Engineering, includes the assessment of how to best enable users to interact with computer-based systems via human-computer interfaces. Our goal is to investigate and evaluate how improving the interaction (via interfaces) between decision-makers and computer-based decision support and information systems (henceforth referred to as DSIS) in electronic business increases decision-makers' effectiveness.******Electronic-business provides decision-makers access to information about a vast array of products available on the Internet, and providing evaluative information and advice from a variety of DSIS sources; including: product recommendation agents (which make purchasing recommendations based on the needs elicited from buyers), experts' advice, other consumers' reviews, as well as social and professional networks. While these help make more informed choices, the downside is that such extensive information about products may cause information and cognitive overload for the decision-maker; plus, recommendations and information sources might provide divergent advice, creating the additional burden of reconciling them to find the best course of action.******The overall objective of this proposed research program is to improve purchasing decision-making in electronic commerce in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Canadian organizations. Towards achieving this goal, I plan to investigate:******1) How to help decision-makers cope with complexity by enabling them to apply consistency seeking strategies to find commonalities of advice provided by a multitude of sources, such as, recommendation agents and experts' advice. ***2) How to achieve consistency between DSIS and decision-makers by allowing recommendation improvement feedback to indicate how the recommendations can be adjusted to achieve better personalization with decision-makers' needs.***3) How to increase the decision-maker's control over DSIS to reduce negative reactance to DSIS recommendations in order to allow for human creativity, and increase the likelihood of DSIS utilization***4) Understanding how a group of decision-makers (rather than one individual) can best interact with computer-based DSIS and what type of interfaces are suitable for such interactions.******This research program is important since: 1)There is little work on how advice provided from multiple sources in electronic-business can be integrated, 2) To date the focus has been on investigating individual decision-makers, largely ignoring potential support for group decision-making via DSIS use in electronic-business, 3) We need to understand how to allow for individual and group creativity in decision-making by putting users in control of their DSIS, rather than imposing restrictive or automated systems, to best combine peoples' expertise with that of DSIS for better synergies.