Decision Enhancement is a field of practice aimed at extending lessons, principles and tools built up over a thirty year period, largely under the term “Decision Support.” Enhancement goes beyond support which has mostly focused on helping managers make use of interactive computer models and methods.

Decision Enhancement substantially adds to the opportunities, especially in the use of the Internet as both an information resource and communications base for collaboration between groups but it also goes well beyond it in two important regards: a focus on enhancement the processes that influence the quality of decisions that really matter in an organization, the ones that are most consequential, complex, and uncertain and a shift from the design of computer- and telecommunications-based tools to a far more comprehensive “studio” approach too the integration of change management, collaborative development and use, and a new generation of visual technology. One of the aphorisms of Decision Enhancement is that “If you can't see it, you won't get it.” Decision Support was of necessity built around “numbers”; Enhancement rests far more on images, dynamic visualization and communicative display.

Decison Enhancement is a lens that focuses on stakeholders in decison arenas and their decisions that matter. It continues with its invitation to bring stakeholders, domain experts and suite designers into its studios. The invitation extends to experts in domains relevant to making DE studios effective, as well as to the suite designers and providers of technology capabilities needed to provide the tools within the studio. Decision Enhancement provides services to guide a journey where executives, their advisors, change management specialists, experts in multi-disciplinary fields and technology developers can come together to make a substantive new impact on effective decison making in any organization. Our hope is that this book adds to the old—the proven lessons and expertise of these fields—and adds to their innovation. It is in this sense that it is an invitation and written to encourage reflection and discussion within and across them.

This book is one of the products of a long colleagueal collaboration between the authors.

They thank their common and respective environments for their support: the universities we have taught in, individual collaborators, companies we have worked with, academic conferences and our students.

We owe a special word of thanks to Zenlin Kwee who has had a major contribution in shaping and finalizing the manuscript. A brilliant young scholar in her own right, she has added immeasurably to the quality of our ideas, their expression and the final book.

Peter G.W. Keen

Henk G. Sol