Future Trends

The biggest challenge for any organization is managing the disperse nature of knowledge across a diverse set of knowledge carriers. The role of ICTs in supporting and extending the organizational memory is of particular concern. The proposed socio-technical framework discussed in this chapter seeks to address the above concerns by promoting learning both as central to decision-making but also as one of its purposes. At the core of the proposed framework lies the need to seek feedback systems as the point of connection between the way social structures shape the information available into meaningful knowledge and the way ICT systems manage the available information in ways that this is fed to users in a timely fashion and in an actionable form.

The use of ICTS to support knowledge management initiatives can only be of benefit, when the main focus is on supporting the development and communication of human meaning (Edwards, 2001). The challenge is to build tools that recognize the sense-reading (i.e., intelligent interpretation and understanding) and sense-giving (i.e., account of one's experience) nature of the decision-making activities (Walsham, 2001), and address the complexities of the interconnected and knowledge-intensive decision processes of the future (Courtney, 2001).

Therefore, future research that seeks to support learning-based decision-making, needs to address systematically these issues and identify mechanisms that can support the development of learning communities for decision practice. As the socio-technical framework to decision-learning propounds, there is a need to balance personal and collective priorities in relation to learning and decision-making, thus maintaining the critical balance of their situated, contextual and emergent nature (Antonacopoulou, 1999).

Clearly we do acknowledge that in this chapter we lay only the foundations of the socio-technical framework of decision-learning and there is clearly a lot more work that needs to be done to overcome the inherent limitation of the current representation of the feedback systems which does not fully capture the dynamism that emphatically underpins the socio-technical approach that ICT systems can support. Not withstanding the limits of representation (at least diagrammatic representation), we feel confident that this framework makes a valuable contribution in extending debates of learning, decision-making and their relationship demonstrating the inherent challenges of the digital era in using ICTs as social as much as technical tools.