The role of feedforward-enabled analytics in improving decision quality: a field study

One of the key determinants of an organization’s success is its ability to adapt to change. Given this reality, an organization’s ability to thrive will depend on the adaptability of its key resource: its management team. A critical facilitator will be the development of decision support (DSS) tools that support the adaptability of managers, and more specifically their mental models. The purpose of this research is to study how changes in mental models can be facilitated by DSS tools that incorporate feedforward mechanisms. The full research will use a mixed method approach, leveraging the strengths of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, to evaluate the impact of feedforward decision support on decision comes. This first phase (quantitative phase) found that the feedforward-enabled DSS tool did create better alignment than the feedback-enabled DSS tool. In fact, the feedback-enabled decision support was shown to result in a poorer alignment with the ideal solution