Supporting Business Decision-making: One Professional at a Time

• This paper discusses the potential for personalized, user-owned decision-support systems. It can be readily seen that there are benefits from analysis of ‘Big Data’ that could not be attained through more traditional means, e.g. insurance and credit card fraud can be detected more readily when it is possible to analyze integrated data across multiple servers owned and controlled by separate organizations. However, high-level data analysis, though useful, cannot be trusted to provide all the answers to organizational ‘questions’. Individuals need to be able to inform themselves in complex decision situations and for this purpose there can be no substitute for ‘little data’ from wherever this is to be drawn. We explore a potential type of support that could overcome the barriers to professional creativity arising through lack of trust in decision-support systems owned and controlled from senior management. The Virtual Personal Assistant described uses natural language processing to interact with a professional user in the context of messy, situated problems, and in private. It has capability to learn from user-interactions and therefore to co-evolve contextually. A ‘little data’ system such as this can therefore help to improve relevance of user understandings in a relatively risk free environment.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik med samhällsvetenskaplig inriktning (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications -- Information Systems, Social aspects (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Virtual Assistant

Little Data

Personalized Support Technology

Natural Language Processing

Contextual Inquiry

Situated Problems

Professional Support

User Owned Decision Support

User Controlled Support

Information System

Decision Support System

Personal decision-support systems

virtual personal assistant

contextual dependencies

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