Group discussion management system in distributed work environments

Abstract

Information technology changes the paradigm of temporal/spatial work environments where meetings and discussions are essential for group decision making in organization. Discussion is one of the core activity of group decision making. Though there are many group discussion supporting tools, they only support methods but not efficiently support discussion management due to the lack of discussion process concept. To support discussions that occurred in object identification process for example, we need a tool that supports various discussion methods and link the methods with input-output paradigm. Output statements from a certain discussion are usually routed to other discussion methods as inputs according to conditional rules. In this thesis, a conceptual model to support discussion process in group decision making is proposed in order to develop a computer-mediated group discussion management system (GDMS) by adopting ``discussion flow`` concept on linking discussion methods. This model focused on identifying how to link respective discussion methods together. To obtain this, meta-discussion structure is suggested to have a consistent discussion structure among unit discussion method(UDM)s that could support specific discussion type and the managerial role to control discussion flow. Discussion occurred in object-identification process in object-oriented software development methodology is presented as an application, and a prototype of a web-based GDMS is implemented based on the suggested model.