Turning the corner on decision support

When I was first asked to be involved in the Decision support system project for Greater Adelaide, I was sceptical that the project could capture the complexity of the decision making environment. However, I was keen to participate and see if the prototype would be useful for the risk management project that I have been managing in South Australia. It’s important to recognise that mitigation decision making needs to consider a multiple of factors in an often ambiguous environment and with limited resources.

The first stage of questionnaires and interviews uncovered more of the complexity of mitigation decision making, however provided a good opportunity to talk to the researchers in depth. This was followed by the brainstorming of the mitigation options, and whilst useful to capture, this was overwhelming as a huge number of options were generated.

It was not until the last two sessions on gaining an understanding of the main drivers and developing the scenarios that I became excited at the prospect of what the DSS project might be able to deliver. Making decisions that consider the aging population, changing demographics, climate change, economic growth and changing industry base along with impact of technology and internet certainly looked very complex to start with, however it made a lot of sense. Putting these elements into the scenarios was where it all came together for me and then mapping it into the time schedule was the particularly illuminating.

To add to the experience the researchers on this team have been a delight to work with and particularly their patience in explaining the complexity of the process. You can read more from Project Leader Prof Holger Maier about the teams progress during 2015 in his end of year blog.