ABSTRACT
The Decision-Making Concepts in a Distributed Environment (DCODE) program is a prototype team decision support concept initially developed at the SPAWAR systems center in San Diego. DCODE supports two phases of collaborative team problem-solving: an individual team member's knowledge construction/analysis phase as well as the team's collaborative process of conflict resolution and consensus-building. DCODE takes the internalized macrocognition assessments used by an individual team member for course of action (COA) analysis and externalizes them into coded iconic displays. A critical individual macrocognitive process is how an analyst goes about making an overall recommendation from his pool of information objects. They can attempt to cognitively pool and integrate all previously elicited cognitive assessment tags, but this can be a difficult and error-prone process that relies heavily on short-term memory. A critical team macrocognitive process is conflict resolution and consensus-building. In any decision-making task there is often a lack of consensus among the participants regarding the group's COA recommendation.
