CoDeS: Collaborative decision support system

Users collaborating for decision making face-to-face tend to be unduly influenced by dominant figures, verbal persuasion and nonverbal cues, communication impact, and intimidating factors brought about by varying field of expertise or social status. Different methods, including the Delphi Method, was introduced to acknowledge every collaborator's opinion, and eliminate the factors mentioned above, which would lead to more productive collaborations and uphold democratic discussions. Consensus is assured through the implementation of multiple iterations of voting and the focus on outliers' opinions. Moreover, with the introduction of Decision Support Systems (DSS), which includes and is not limited to instant messaging, emails, and chat-rooms, users from different locations are now allowed to meet asynchronously in a virtual web-based environment despite the differences in their time frames. In this environment, both experts and non-experts may contribute their ideas to allow consensus building. Usually, a discussion is facilitated not by a single facilitator unlike the traditional Delphi Method. With such a numerous set of ideas contributed to the pool of discussion, the goal of the Delphi Method of highlighting outliers' opinions are drowned in the discussions. Giving emphasis on the quality of the decisions to be maintained, Surowiecki's framework in the Wisdom of Crowds was adopted giving foci on independence of opinions, their diversity, decentralization, and aggregation. Collaborative Decision Support System (CoDeS) merges the Delphi Method and Surowiecki's framework into the implementation of a web-based decision support system through the testing conducted, it goes to show that CoDeS has been able to maintain the set of outlier opinions which traditionally would not have been identified or given focus with minor complaints on the navigational features. This paper in turn focuses on the implementation of CoDeS allowing collaborations among users for varying discussions.