Content area
Abstract
Decision support for ill-structured managerial problems involves facilitating managers' thinking process rather than suggesting a solution. A general heuristic system was developed to describe human activity systems to support learning and managerial thinking. The heuristic system consists of objects and processes (decision makers, the affected, competitors, partners, tasks, values, goals, plans and environment) and their properties (factual information, semantic knowledge, episodic knowledge and context information).
Managers can interact with the heuristic system on a regular basis to improve the quality of their thinking and the quality of their decision making. The general heuristic system was applied to the domain of "Doing Business on the World Wide Web". The application of the heuristic system was implemented on the World Wide Web to gather feedback from practitioners. Data analysis indicates that the heuristic system is viewed as highly valuable by practitioners. Episodic knowledge is more useful than semantic knowledge since the episodic knowledge (stories and cases) usually illustrate the essence of the semantic knowledge (rules and principles). Experts value the heuristic system more than non-experts do because experts combine their experience best with the knowledge contained in the domain heuristic system to improve understanding of the issues. Many Web design and Internet marketing professionals have commented on the domain heuristic system very positively.
