An integrated environment for organisational decision support

The challenges and requirements associated with the provision of organisational decision support are presented with the aim of supporting the through-life development of network enabled capability (NEC) systems. These requirements were compiled through a review of pertinent literature as well as through a series of workshops held with the industrial sponsor of this research - BAE Systems. An architecture is described here for organisational decision support that was developed from the requirements and was subsequently used to create a prototype integrated decision support environment (IDSE). The IDSE was developed incrementally, adding functionality relating to the provision of organisational decision support (DS) with the performance evaluation after each development stage. A scenario and associated case-study were developed within the NECTISE project and presented here, which allowed the demonstration and evaluation of the first prototype IDSE within four separate live simulations. The evaluation feedback from BAE Systems and the Ministry of Defence representatives suggests that the architecture and prototype implementation of the IDES for the provision of organisational decision support are both relevant and mature for future industrial application. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.