Sunday 27 May 2012

“Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”

Ahmed Elragal and Ola El-Telbany (2012). “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”. In: 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 432–443

Abstract

The emergence of the Enterprise 2.0 technologies indicates that they can provide value to different types of users and potentially different types of value. Many published research explored what these E2.0 tools and applications can offer to organizations, such as collaboration platforms, social networking and user-created content, enhancing their productivity and management among employees. However, little research was devoted to study the effect these tools and applications have on the decision making process. Decision 2.0 has received little attention in literature, especially from the standpoint of making use of the “crowd”. Therefore, this paper focuses on this research gap with a case study in an attempt to elucidate and extract knowledge to answer this question “How does decision 2.0 make use of the crowd to support the traditional decision making process and hence add value to organizations through collaboration and collective intelligence?”

Review

After reading Elragal and El-Telbany, 2012: “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”, I was a bit disappointed. I hoped to read something more specific, like a concept for collaborative decision making, focusing on using Enterprise 2.0 tools within organizations to improve organizational decision making processes.

The theoretical part of this paper is in general well written and an interesting read. Most notable is perhaps the reference to Herbert Simon’s decision making model. Simon, 1979: “Rational decision making in business organizations” seems to me to be a good starting point for exploring rational decision making further. For more information about Herbert Simon’s approach to rational decision making, Wikipedia contributors and Sun, 2012: "Administrative Behavior — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia" and Michalek, 2003: "Herbert Simon Collection" seem to be reasonable resources.

The case study then describes a situation where customers, “the crowd”, were enabled to provide input for decision making. Much like any social media campaign that involves a poll as feedback channel. In the case study, involving the customer and thus using the “wisdom of the crowd” finally changed the decision anticipated by the management and ultimately “positively impacted all the brands’ major key performance indicators”. That is a good point to make, just perhaps a bit obvious.

Altogether, the paper is an interesting read if you are interested in business management, marketing and social media, but not so much if you are interested in knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0.

References

Elragal and El-Telbany, 2012: “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”
Elragal, Ahmed and Ola El-Telbany (2012). “Decision 2.0: An Exploratory Case Study”. In: 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Science (HICSS). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society, pp. 432–443.
Simon, 1979: “Rational decision making in business organizations”
Simon, H.A. (1979). “Rational decision making in business organizations”. In: The American economic review 69.4, pp. 493–513.
Wikipedia contributors and Sun, 2012: "Administrative Behavior — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia"
Wikipedia contributors and Richard KP Sun (2012). Administrative Behavior — Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. url: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Administ rative_Behavior&oldid=493987241 (visited on 27 May 2012).
Michalek, 2003: "Herbert Simon Collection"
Michalek, Gabrielle V. (2003). Herbert Simon Collection. url: http://diva.library.cmu.edu/Simon/ (visited on 27 May 2012).

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