What is Decision makers

Managing a public sector organization is a highly complex task involving multiple stakeholders coupled with informational and resource material flows. Decision making in such complex tasks, for example heath-care system, presents challenges. On one hand, the complexity of public sector organizations does not lend itself well to real-world trial and error approach. Practical, political, and/or ethical constraints often restrict any experimentation with many real-world phenomena such as medical decision-making, hazardwaste management, climate change, and so forth. On the other hand, most of the real-world “decisions and their consequences” are hardly related in both time and space, which makes learning even harder to occur (Hogarth, 1981; Sterman, 1989). Recent advancements in computer technology, together with developments in system dynamics simulation methods, provide a potential solution that involves design and development of the decision support systems to aid decision making in complex public sector systems (Qudrat-Ullah, 2005). In this paper we argue that system- dynamics-based interactive learning environments (SDILEs) could serve as an effective decision support system for public sector management.