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Abstract
After 10 years in teaching a variety of topics in decision making one of the authors decided to develop a tool that can help decision makers to consolidate their knowledge around a particular decision problem. The three remaining authors have joined the R&D team over the next two decades; the work resulted in the Doctus knowledge-based system which is currently 25 years in development. In the most recent incarnation of Doctus we are able to identify relevant patterns from previous decisions by other decision makers, learning from which can be helpful to the decision makers with the decision situation at hand.
In this paper we introduce the latest incarnation of our Doctus KBS, featuring three distinct ways of reasoning; the newest 'third way of reasoning' supports reusing previous decision experience. As far as we know, Doctus is currently the only decision support tool capable of identifying relevant experience as well as learning from it. In this paper we provide a prelude for how the new solution should work in real-life decision support.
Keywords: Decision making, Decision support, Experience mining, Patterns of cognition, Smart decision
Track: Management
Word count: 2.478
1. Introduction
The four of us have spent many years working with, for, and on executive decision takers in various ways. We have worked as executive coaches, we have been doing research and published academic papers and books about executive decision takers and how to support them, we have acted as knowledge engineers and developed the knowledge-based expert system shell Doctus, we have been teaching decision takers in classroom environments and developing them in their organizational contexts. Our research, teaching, and consultancy mutually affect each other. We use the feedback from our knowledge engineer work as input for our research, we include our research findings in our teaching and also use them in our consultancy, etc. We have also used our multi-faceted experience to design post-experiential, post-MBA courses for decision takers. Three years ago, we started a drama-based course for executives and executive coaches (Baracskai, Dörfler, & Velencei, 2010) and based on this experience two years ago we have developed a more personalized approach for supporting and developing executives in their natural organizational context using dramas as tools for decision support (Baracskai, Dörfler,...