A Case Study of Web-Based Collaborative Decision Support at NASA

Abstract

Today, organizations rely on decision makers to produce “mission critical” decisions that are based on inputs from multiple domains. The ideal decision maker has a profound understanding of specific domains, coupled with the experience that allows them to act quickly and decisively on the information. Daily they face problems and failures that are too difficult for any individual person to solve; therefore, teams are now required to share their knowledge in spontaneous collaborations. Since requisite expertise may not all reside in the same organization, nor be geographically colocated, virtual networked teams are needed. This paper presents a case study describing the development and use of Postdoc, NASA’s Web-based collaborative and knowledge management platform.