Last year, an experiment was conducted at the VU University to determine what the role of virtual worlds could be in geographically distributed decision making processes. Virtual worlds have been receiving a lot of media attention over the past year, and people in organizations increasingly have experience in various virtual environments. Still, we are in the dark about the potential value of these environments for organizations. Combined with the fact that people in organizations increasingly work geographically dispersed, and independent of time and location, this triggered us to consider the possibilities of virtual worlds as group decision support systems.Our aim was to study the contribution of virtual worlds to geographically dispersed team decision making in terms of both facilitating (and improving) the interaction between participants, and improving the quality of the decision being reached. Not that important now, but I think we could better frame this in terms of communication/interaction and information gathering/processing. Improving the decision being reached is an outcome, while facilitating interaction concerns the process (see presentation) In order to be able to do this, we compared decision making in virtual worlds (we used Second Life for our experiment) to decision making that was supported by a purely text-based chat functionality. This would enable us to determine the added value of the visualization that virtual worlds offer in terms of both interaction and decision making.

The decision process that was central in the experiment focused on a spatial decision problem. A team had to make a decision on the use of a vacant piece of land situated in an urban area. The virtual world of Second Life was used to create a virtual image of an urban area.

Group Decision Making in Second Life

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