| Meetings have increasingly been scrutinized for being inefficient and not bringing the intended results to the participants. At the executive level where meetings are proportionally of higher importance, in regards to both time and strategic merit, these inefficiencies are costing corporations money. If all middle and executive managers spend a high proportion (60--80%) in meetings and then waste half their time on unproductive meetings -- close to half their work-time (salary) are used on waste. These problems could be solved, or strongly improved upon, by implementing a facilitator to lead the meetings.;The problem of facilitation is that it is a difficult to find trained facilitators. These skills (or techniques) are currently not promoted in most college curriculums and the majority of managers are not comfortable leading a group. Even those skilled in public speaking can often be overwhelmed and frustrated when several issues have to be reviewed and discussed during a meeting. The easy way out is to decide for the members or quickly adopt the first feasible solution (satisfizing or bounded rationality).;To assist facilitators develop good procedures in pursuing group consensus, one solution is to develop a computer assisted collaboration tool that will (1) assist the novice facilitator in developing a collaboration script that will assist in the development of a process that will bring the group through the collaborative process, and finally -- reach consensus, (2) can develop the meeting agenda as well as teaching collaboration engineering topics/tools along the way (informative and what-if analysis), and finally (3) integrate its recommendations into a process that is similar to the facilitation sequence used by a well developed GSS system (in this case -- Group Systems). The challenge to developing this tool is to both assist in a dynamic and objective way as we realize that human coaching will still be the main teaching tool due to collaboration's dynamic nature. |
