1997 Volume 6 Issue 3 Pages 41-60
In this paper we show the importance of some roles of Soft Systems Approach, especially Soft Systems Methodology, on Group Decision Support: (1) to let decision makers know the possibility of misunderstanding of information about themselves, (2) to get correct information about decision makers' experiences, contributions, and status in the organization, and (3) to let decision makers refer to the information about other decision makers. Moreover, we propose a way to measure the difference of decision makers' opinions, and a method to measure the divergence of opinions in a group as a whole. By using the way and the method, we provide a way to express numerically the effect of Soft Systems Methodology applied to support group decision making. This way can be used to confirm experimentally the validity of the roles, that are described above, of Soft Systems Methodology on Group Decision Support.
