Decision Support Systems And The Professional

Decision Support Systems and the Professional Micheal Axelsen Research Colloquium 2009

About the speaker
Micheal Axelsen is Chair of the CPA Australia ITM Centre of Excellence, and is principal consultant of Applied Insight Pty Ltd
Primary professional interest is in ensuring that clients have the right enterprise data governance strategies and practical
approaches in meeting business compliance obligations.
PhD investigates the effects of technology adoption (specifically, dominance by technology) upon the audit profession. If you aren’t careful he will tell you all about it.
He holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons), Masters of Information Systems, and is an FCPA.
Available on [email_address] at any time

Outline
Decision support systems are important components of today’s businesses
In fact we rely on them more than ever in the name of efficiency and effectiveness
To deliver, these these support systems are becoming highly sophisticated tools
Let’s talk though about some potential unintended consequences about their use in practice
This is exciting, science fiction stuff

Benefits of DSSs
Consistency
Reliability
Cover your backside in legal actions demanding rigour in the work – the ‘Your Honour’ effect
Controlling junior staff, and risk management
Increased efficiency
Enforces good documentation and ‘rationale’
Particularly helps us deal with the issues of an aging and shrinking workforce

Decisions, decisions
However, technology helps us to make decisions.
It does not MAKE the decision
A frequent lament is that ‘nobody uses the thing’
But it is possible to over-rely on decision support systems, or to even be ‘deskilled’ by them

Computer says ‘No’
Thank you, Carol
However, as a professional remember it is up to you to use your noggin.
A professional should be making a professional judgment call – this cannot be made by the computer

A problem?
The monetising lure of the ‘junior burger’ effect
Who will write tomorrow’s decision support systems?
Set it up to ‘push a button’ – little fish in the sea
Too many spreadsheets?
‘ It’s like we had to learn how to audit again.’
Over-purchase of inventory
What could possibly go wrong with that - VAR
The difference between risk and uncertainty

People are strange
They’re not machines...

Anchoring & adjustment heuristic
Anchoring & adjustment is a rule of thumb we tend to use to make estimates – it’s so much easier than getting all the facts!
Estimates are made by starting from an initial value that is adjusted to yield the final answer; the initial value may be suggested by problem’s formulation, or be the result of a partial computation
The adjustments made are usually insufficient (Slovic & Lichtenstein 1971), resulting in adjustment bias
People tend to rely upon the output of the decision support system more than there is a right to do.
This theory suggests that experience will be reduced if the DSS’s design encourages excessive anchoring, which cognitive load suggests decreases knowledge

Anchoring & adjustment heuristic After Tversky & Kahnemann (1974); Epley & Gilovich (1996)

Cognitive load theory
Decision aids tend to reduce knowledge acquisition relative to manual environments because aid users can substantially reduce the effort devoted to a task and let the aid "do the work" (Todd and Benbasat 1992; Todd and Benbasat 1994)
Auditor knowledge is a function of ability, effort and experience (Awasthi & Pratt 1990; Libby & Tan 1994)
A well established and tested theory of determinants of knowledge that suggests factors separate to those identified by TTD as contributing to deskilling

Cognitive load theory
Experts and novices in a problem domain adopt differing problem solving strategies (Sweller 1988):
Novices identified end goals and worked backwards from those goals through identified sub-goals using means-end analysis
Experts eliminated the backward-looking phase
Experts have acquired schemas as a result of their experience with past problems, whereas novices are forced to use generalised problem-solving strategies as they do not yet possess these schemas (Sweller, 1988).
I wonder – if we remove their experience, will they ever get the skills?

Cognitive load theory After Sweller (1988); Libby & Tan (1994)

Who am I going to believe?

Introducing the theory of technology dominance
Arnold & Sutton (1998) developed this theory in response to the limited success of Intelligent Decision Aids in the audit domain, and to see how IDAs might be more effectively designed for audits
Essentially two potential concerns:
A person’s judgment may be unduly influenced by the technology
A person’s professional skills may decline over time – they are ‘deskilled’

Theory of technology dominance
Things that matter in whether the tool is used (‘relied upon’) or not:
Experience with doing the task before
Complexity of the task
The user’s familiarity with using that decision aid
Does the decision aid mesh with the user’s ‘world view’ or cognitive fit?

Theory of technology dominance
Susceptibility to dominance by technology:
Mismatching the user expertise and the IDA level increases the risk of poor decision making
Matching user expertise level and an IDA level generally improves decision making
Long-term effects (deskilling):
Continued use of an IDA results in a deskilling of the knowledge workers’ abilities in that professional area
The more people within the profession that have been deskilled by long-term use of the IDA, the slower the growth in advancing that professional area

What have we learned?
Don’t be too restrictive when you develop a DSS – allow for professional judgment
Realise a DSS is not the sum total of knowledge – the “S” stands for Support
Ask, should this decision support system be developed? Will anyone ever use it?
As computers increasingly dominate our lives, the temptation is to be drawn in by the promises of a DSS, but can it be delivered?
Oh yes and...

Keep thinking!

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Decision Support Systems And The Professional

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