Collaborative decision-making software

Collaborative decision-making (CDM) software is a software application or module that helps to coordinate and disseminate data and reach consensus among work groups. Increase in the competition of the marketplaces, changing organizational structures and pushing the limits of expectations and emerging new challenges for higher officials to deal with international collaborations are all the influence of globalization on the businesses. The need to deal with multicultural collaborative groups working in distributed environments to recover from uncertainty, indefinite problem definitions and changing information made collaborative technologies evolve.

CDM software coordinates the functions and features required to arrive at timely collective decisions, enabling all relevant stakeholders to participate in the process. The core principle of CDM software is that good decisions are not made in isolation in response to an individual's idea or individual piece of data. They require shared knowledge and analysis of a combination of different pieces of information. Earlier forms of computer-mediated communication(CMC) tools can also be effective for facilitating communication and developing working relationships, but the demand from globalization and the pressure of taking best decisions has increased.

The selection of communication tools is very important for high end collaborative efforts. Online collaboration tools are very different from one another, some use older forms of Internet-based technologies whereas others are using Web 2.0., blogs, forums, rich site summary(RSS), feeds, opinion polls, social networking and community chats are some of the instances for potential communication tools. The practice of these Web 2.0 tools, is now commonly known as collaboration 2.0, which increases the quality of practical collaborations such that it looks almost similar to a conventional face to face forms of collaboration. Managing and working in virtual teams is not any task but it is being done for decades now. The most important factor for any virtual team is decision making. All the virtual teams have to discuss, analyze and find solutions to problems through continuous brain storming session collectively. An emerging enhancement in the integration of social networking and business intelligence (BI),has drastically improvised the decision making by directly linking the information on BI systems with collectively gathered inputs from social software.

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