This research is funded under the Special Initiative on Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology. This is one of eleven winners under that competition. In distributed decision environments, intelligent agents at network nodes interact with private databases, common databases, and each other to coordinate their independent actions. This project explores how certain human, organizational, and technological elements in a distributed corporate planning setting, condition the level of coordination and integration of the agents' individual plans. The researchers work with the Management Systems Research Group of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to develop, test and evaluate decision support facilities for their individual, autonomous planning decisions. The researchers evaluate the outcomes of systems use among a set of interdependent business unit managers in terms of the coordination and integration of their individual plans taken as a whole, as well as the level of trust, commitment, understanding a cooperation they experience in this distributed planning setting. The distributed decision making of these autonomous, yet interdependent, agents is a setting of very high equivocality and uncertainty. the research is action-based, selectively adding structure and feedback capabilities to increase the richness of communication supported by the systems. It is a theory driven, empirical, investigation of how increased communication richness of a decision support facility affects the experience and outcome of a distributed planning systems.
