About collaborative decision making

Posted by maryparker on June 6th, 2014

Collaborative decision making is basically a situation when individually face collectively to make a choice from certain given alternatives. Therefore, the decision is not attributable to a single person, who is a member of a group, but is attributable to the whole team. The outcome consists of a social process where the social influence contributes to it. In this case, a decision making system can be used in order to ease the work of the team and make the decision process quicker and simpler. Group decisions tend to be more extreme when making decisions than individuals. However, this practice is very common in big companies.

The decision making system is a specific computerized information class, and it usually supports business decisions and organizational activity. The decision system is, basically, software with interactive purposes, which will help teams compile a set of useful information from personal knowledge, raw data and documents in order to identify problems and solve them easily. There is typical information which will support this kind of application, such as comparative sakes between weeks, accessing current data of the company, consequences of different alternatives, and projected revenue which are based on assumptions of new product sales. The decision system is very useful when teamwork is involved in a decision making process.

The collaborative style is known to be a style used for making better and more accurate decisions in business matter especially, but it is always better when this style is supported by specialized software. One of the style criteria definitely involves the personality of members, but is not, in any case, defined by it. When choosing to work with collaborative decision making you must make sure you identify how much collaboration you need when making a specific decision. You should plan to increase the level of collaboration when the commitment to understanding or implementation is high. This represents a clear point in the collaborative decisions, as the decision values more than the actual process.

Psychology also discussed collaborative decision making and it reached the conclusion that there certain changes which occur in the collective decision making, and these represent the essence of a team, being more efficient than a single decision. However, there are several formal systems which can be used in group decision making, such as the voting-based method, the consensus method, the Delphi method, or the Dotmocracy. All these methods involve one or more teams collaborating together in order to reach the best outcome. Each company should look into these alternatives and decide which works better for their teams.

Therefore, the collaborative decision making is one of the best choices for decisions taken at a high level. When time and resources are important, and where decisions must be accurate and risk-free, having a team work together becomes more efficient. However, this method should be always paired with special software in order to speed up the process of decision making and simplify it. The collaborative method is widely used in big organizations and companies, because it is practical and less time-consuming.

Choosing the collaborative decision making  for your company is one of the best choices you will ever make. This method should be combined with a decision making system  in order to achieve great success!