On Investigating the Cognitive Complexity of Designing the Group Decision Process

The paper investigates the cognitive complexity associated with the design of group decision processes (GDP) in relation with some basic contextual factors such us task complexity, users’ creativity and problem space complexity. The analysis is done by conducting a socio-simulation experiment for an envisioned software tool that acts as collaborative environment for the GDP design. The simulation results provide some insights on how to engineer context-adaptable functionalities aiming at minimizing the cognitive complexity associated with the GDP design. Although the research is carried out for a specific case, namely the GDSS technology, the results may be easily replicated for any sort of collaborative working environment where the cognitive complexity associated with its effective use is playing an important role.