Information systems engineering for distributed decisionmaking

There are many issues associated with the design and evaluation of information systems to aid real-time dynamic decision-making in environments where decision-making responsibility and knowledge bases are physically separated and potentially geographically distributed; and where there are multiple agents, each responsible for portions of the decision-making effort. There are a great many concerns that must be addressed for the enhancement of decision flexibility and facilitation of cooperative decision making in organizational settings, and for applications such as command and control. The author discusses some of these, in terms of contemporary research and research needs in this area, and provides a partial taxonomy of distributed decision-making issues as they relate to the design of information systems.