Improving Digital Decision Making Through Situational Awareness

Abstract

Technical advances in Information and Communication Technology have enabled the collection and storage of large amounts of data, rising hopes of digitalising and thus potentially improving decision making and related support systems. Unfortunately however, the pre-existing gap between required decision making knowledge and the useful information provided by current technologies appears to increase rather than contract. Thus, the multitude of patterns presently provided by current data analytics techniques do not deliver an adequate set of scenarios to enable effective decision making by humans. This paper advocates a digital decision analytics solution featuring the use of Situated Logic to create ‘narratives’ describing the meaning of data analytics results and the use of Channel Theory in order to support adequate situational awareness. This approach is explained in the context of a System-of-Systems paradigm highly relevant to today’s typically complex clusters of distributed collaborative decision making centres and their associated decision support systems.