Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management

Chapter 10Decision-Making Systems

Learning Objectives:

After studying this chapter, the reader will be able to do the following:

1. Identify two classes of decision-making systems (Section 10.1).
2. Describe the stages through which a decision-making system progresses (Section 10.1).
3. Describe how an organization influences its decision-makers (Section 10.2).
4. Describe different decision-making roles (Section 10.3).
5. Identify the functions of the participants in a dialogue decision process (Section 10.3).
6. Describe the function of information in a decision-making system (Sections 10.4 and 10.7).
7. Explain the tradeoffs involved in centralizing and decentralizing decision making in an organization (Section 10.5).
8. Describe the relationship between the structure of an organization and the structure of the systems that it designs (Section 10.5).
9. Explain why a product development organization is a decision-making system (Section 10.6).
10. Describe different ways to organize a product development organization and identify the strengths and weaknesses of each (Section 10.7).
11. Explain why a product development organization is like a factory (Section 10.8).

The last part of our discussion of engineering decision making will consider the third perspective: decision-making systems. This perspective considers the people who perform the decision-making process and the flow of information.

A product development organization is a decision-making system (Herrmann and Schmidt, 2002), and this perspective ...