Supporting Business Decision-making: One Professional at a Time
Author
Editor
- Gloria Phillips-Wren
- Sven Carlsson
- Ana Respício
- Patrick Brézillon
Summary, in English
This paper discusses the potential for personalized, user-owned decision-support systems. It can be readily seen that there are benefits from analysis of ‘Big Data’ that could not be attained through more traditional means, e.g. insurance and credit card fraud can be detected more readily when it is possible to analyze integrated data across multiple servers owned and controlled by separate organizations. However, high-level data analysis, though useful, cannot be trusted to provide all the answers to organizational ‘questions’. Individuals need to be able to inform themselves in complex decision situations and for this purpose there can be no substitute for ‘little data’ from wherever this is to be drawn. We explore a potential type of support that could overcome the barriers to professional creativity arising through lack of trust in decision-support systems owned and controlled from senior management. The Virtual Personal Assistant described uses natural language processing to interact with a professional user in the context of messy, situated problems, and in private. It has capability to learn from user-interactions and therefore to co-evolve contextually. A ‘little data’ system such as this can therefore help to improve relevance of user understandings in a relatively risk free environment.
Department/s
Publishing year
2014
Language
English
Pages
471-482
Publication/Series
DSS 2.0 – Supporting Decision Making with New Technologies
Volume
261
Full text
- Available as PDF - 123 kB
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Document type
Book chapter
Publisher
IOS Press
Topic
- Information Systems, Social aspects
Keywords
- Virtual Assistant
- Little Data
- Personalized Support Technology
- Natural Language Processing
- Contextual Inquiry
- Situated Problems
- Professional Support
- User Owned Decision Support
- User Controlled Support
- Information System
- Decision Support System
- Personal decision-support systems
- virtual personal assistant
- contextual dependencies
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 978-1-61499-398-8
- ISBN: 978-1-61499-399-5