Rational Decisions in Organisations: Theoretical and Practical Aspects

Managers in organisations must make rational decisions. Rational decision making is the opposite of intuitive decision making. It is a strict procedure utilising objective knowledge and logic. It involves identifying the problem to solve, gathering facts, identifying options and outcomes, analysing them, considering all the relationships and selecting the decision.

Rational decision making requires support: methods and software tools. The identification of the problem to solve needs methods that would measure and evaluate the current situation. Identification and evaluation of options and analysis of the available possibilities involves analysis and optimisation methods. Incorporating intuition into rational decision making needs adequate methods that would translate ideas or observed behaviours into hard data. Communication, observation and opinions recording is hardly possible today without adequate software. Information and data that form the input, intermediate variables and the output must be stored, managed and made accessible in a user-friendly manner.

Rational Decisions in Organisations: Theoretical and Practical Aspects presents selected recent developments in the support of the widely understood rational decision making in organisations, illustrated through case studies. The book shows not only the variety of perspectives involved in decision making, but also the variety of domains where rational decision support systems are needed. The case studies present decision making by medical doctors, students and managers of various universities, IT project teams, construction companies, banks and small and large manufacturing companies.

Covering the richness of relationships in which the decisions should and must be taken, the book illustrates how modern organisations operate in chains and networks; they have multiple responsibilities, including social, legal, business and ethical duties. Nowadays, managers in organisations can make transparent decisions and consider a multitude of stakeholders and their diverse features, incorporating diverse criteria, using multiple types and drivers of information and decision-making patterns, and referring to numerous lessons learned. As the book makes clear, the marriage of theoretical ideas with the possibilities offered by technology can make the decisions in organisations more rational and, at the same time, more human.

Frédéric Adam is a full Professor in the Department of Business Information Systems in University College of Cork’s Business School. His research interests are focused on Decision Support Systems both in business and in the medical area where he has led a number of projects aimed at developing decision support artefacts for clinicians. He has also published extensively in the ERP area. His research has appeared in the Journal of Information Technology, the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, in Decision Support Systems and in Information and Management. He is a PI in the Financial Services Innovation Centre and a founding PI in the INFANT research centre. An elected Governor of University College Cork since 2011, Frederic Adam sits on its Finance Committee.

Stanislaw Stanek is on the faculty of the General Tadeusz Kosciuszko Military Academy of Land Forces in Wroclaw, Poland.

Dorota Kuchta has over 30 years of experience as researcher, teacher and trainer in project management, operations research and managerial accounting. Her research focus are management models and methods under uncertainty, ambiguity and incomplete knowledge. She is the author of about 250 publications in these areas, published among others in such journals as Fuzzy Sets and Systems, R &D Management, Journal of Systems and Software or Journal of Multiple-Valued Logic and Soft Computing and in such publishing houses as Springer or Taylor and Francis. She has led five research projects and supervised 15 PhD theses. She is the holder of two project management certificates: Certified Project Management Associate and PRINCE2 Foundation. She has large international experience, due to several years spent in various countries as PhD student, research worker and visiting professor.