An integrated framework for decision support in corporate planning

摘要

Corporate planning and decision making is a complex but critical management process in multidivisional organizations. This process entails a determination of the objectives and operational constraints at various levels of management. The decision-making function in such large diversified corporations proceeds by assessing the decision alternatives at each level of management with reference to their mutual tradeoffs, and arriving at an equilibrium point. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for the design of an integrated DSS in hierarchical organizations. The proposed framework consists of five steps: Analysis of the corporate decision making process, building a model of the decision making process, configuring a DSS for this model, pilot study and implementation. We illustrate the proposed design principles by considering a three-level hierarchical organization and modeling the decision-making process within this organization. A case analysis of the proposed integrated framework is provided. The case study has been conducted with decision makers in a simulated business environment. This research has given rise to several new avenues of exploration and extensions of the proposed design. We present the conclusions from this study and directions for future research in this area. Our experience with this approach in the case analysis has been quite positive, and this suggests that similar results may be obtained in real world organizations as well. We are currently testing the proposed approach with a local organization.