TOP-MODELER©: Supporting Complex Strategic and Operational Decisionmaking

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Majchrzak, Ann | Gasser, Les

Affiliations: Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA, e-mail: majchrza@usc.edu | Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, 501 E. Daniel Street, Champaign, IL 61801, USA, e-mail: gasser@uiuc.edu

Abstract: Senior managers frequently make difficult strategic decisions that affect their entire organization.  To do this, they often must rely on management experience and intuition.  A growing arsenal of tools can be used to ensure that experience and intuition are appropriately applied and even enhanced by industry-wide best-practice knowledge, a comprehensive understanding of the firm's strengths and weaknesses, and an analytic assessment of how to prioritize implementation activities.  This paper describes the use, development and evaluation of a tool called TOP-MODELER.  We discuss the foundations of TOP-MODELER and the process of developing and validating its comprehensive knowledgebase.  We also illustrate how TOP-MODELER has been applied to help streamline and clarify strategic and operations decisions for a wide array of strategists, designers, and managers in manufacturing (and other) organizations.

Journal: Information Knowledge Systems Management, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 95-110, 2000