Requirements for improving the use of computers to support the development of policy decisions (abstract only)

Computer based information systems have been developed and used successfully for production and engineering and for lower level management tasks but they have yet to be widely applied to aiding management decision making at the higher policy making levels. Despite many attempts, the failures have been many and the successes few. This has resulted in large part from the fact that the technicians who have been engaged to design such systems have not correctly understood the nature of the problem environment with which they are dealing. Because they themselves have had no experience at the policy making levels, they have had a poor conception of the problems to be solved, and thus have made mistakes which they would not have made, had they been designing an information system for lower level tasks. In designing an inventory or process control system, for instance, the technicians have carefully studied the nature of the problems to be dealt with, and have decided which information is important and which not. They have not, in these cases, delivered reams of superfluous information to every point in the system. But when designing an information system to aid higher level decision making, they have tended to do the exact opposite. They have attempted to put every conceivable piece of information that could possibly be of the most remote interest at the fingertips of each and every policy maker -- each of whom is already suffering from a severe information overload. The decision maker could never possibly begin to digest all of this information, even if he found it useful, which, in general, he does not. This paper proposes methods for dealing with this crucial inhibiting problem.