Ch. 16 Creative Decision Making and Problem Solving

Ch. 17 Intelligent Software Agents

Decision Support Systems in the 21st Century, 2nd Edition

by George M. Marakas

What is Creativity?

Creativity is the ability to see the same things as everyone else but think something different.

Creativity involves the translation of our unique gifts and talents into something that is both new and useful.

Creativity is an important element in finding new ways to do old things and ways to do things yet undone.

Creativity Defined

To further refine our definition, we must distinguish between three related, but unique characteristics.

1. Intelligence is the ability to think and learn.

2. Academic achievement results in a degree after years of lectures, exams, and theses.

3. Creativity is the ability to redirect a line of thought into new directions.

The Occurrence of CreativityWhen creativity emerges, it often occurs in the form of an intuitive flash of insight.It is usually just the complete idea that is revealed. Equations, testing, and analysis come much later.An example is Velcro, which arose from George de Mestral’s observation about how cockleburs clung to clothes.Another is Post-It notes. Arthur Fry wanted a “poor” adhesive so he used a colleague’s adhesive that was “useless” because it took years to set.

Different Ways to Think

There are five basic categories of ways to think:1. Logical thinking – the decision maker builds

on his or her analytical abilities.2. Lateral thinking – disrupts the usual vertical

thinking by introducing discontinuity3. Critical thinking – takes the position that

certain elements within a problem context are most critical to the solution. For example, Pareto’s Law implies that 80% of problems occur from 20% of causes.

Different Ways to Think (cont.)

There are five basic categories of ways to think:4. Opposite thinking – the decision maker

takes the perspective of someone other than himself.

5. Groupthink – an alternative way of thinking that can be used to achieve group involvement.

Lateral Thinking

Three major activities are available to promote lateral thinking.

1. Awareness – these activities are intended to identify and understand current ideas (but not to evaluate them).

2. Alternatives – a conscious effort is made to produce as many different ways as possible to look at the problem.

3. Provocation – discontinuity is introduced into the thought process by forcing a change in the way the problem is viewed.

The Pareto “80-20 rule”

Torn

box

Not paint

ed

Cracked sen

sor

Broken pa

rt

Loose

wire

Faulty sen

sor

Dirty se

nsor

Missing par

t

Bent H

ousin

g

Paint

scratch

2 2 2 2 3 3 3 43643

2.0 2.0 2.0 2.0 3.0 3.0 3.0 4.036.043.0

100.0 98.0 96.0 94.0 92.0 89.0 86.0 83.0 79.0 43.0

100

50

0

100

80

60

40

20

0

Defect

Count

PercentCum %

Percent

Count

Pareto Chart for Light Defect

About 80% of defects are due to only two of 10 categories

Intuition

Intuition is often identified as an important element in creative decision making and problem solving.

Managers who can harness their intuition can often respond more quickly to a given situation and apply both experience and judgment.

Barriers to Creativity

Self-constraining beliefs – the participant makes the problem more difficult by assuming certain constraining conditions that do not exist.

Fears, beliefs, and stresses – people that fear criticism or have strong beliefs may have limited ability to be “free” and creative

Routines and rigidity – this may inhibit the information gathering, interactions, and incubation of thought that leads to creativity.

Creative Problem-Solving Techniques

Most techniques fit into four categories:

1. Serendipity – we cannot control this, but can enhance its probability of occurring by actively studying unexplained phenomena.

2. Free association – techniques in this category, such as brainstorming, focus on divergent thinking and creation of ideas while deferring judgment on those ideas.

Creative Problem-Solving Techniques (cont.)

Most techniques fit into four categories:

3. Structured relationships – new ideas are generated by forcing together two or more objects to produce new objects.

4. Group techniques – these enhance creativity in multiparticipant problem-solving contexts.

Tools to Aid Brainstorming

This free association technique involves gathering together a set of often-diverse people to generate a long list of ideas about a problem.

After this long list is generated, it is culled down to manageable size, often with surprisingly little effort.

Two commercial tools to aid in brainstorming are IdeaFisher and GroupSystems.

A Dialogue from Ideocentics’ IdeaFisher

What qualifies a person to be a potential customer? Young, professional, athletic and/or fashion conscious, has purchasing power.

What purchasing power? Will spend up to $100 weekly on apparel.

What decision-making power? Independent.

For this marketing effort, who is your choicest customer? (A regular customer? A past customer? A first time buyer?)  For what reason?

Some of the Tools in GroupSystems

Osborn’s 73 Idea-Spurring Questions

1. Put to other uses

2. Adapt

3. Modify

4. Magnify

5. Minify

6. Substitute

7. Rearrange

8. Reverse

9. Combine

Osborne created an “idea checklist” of questions that asked the user to look at things from a new perspective. Details are in Table 16-2, but the questions fit in nine basic categories.

Morphological Forced Connections

Another structured relationships technique.

A user writes down attributes of a problem, listing as many alternatives as possible for each attribute.

The user is then asked to consider all possible combinations of the alternatives.

These analyses can be performed in a matrix format and can easily be delivered via a DSS.

Analytic Hierarchy Process

It is often difficult to conceptualize all the different elements of a problem, or there is not enough cognitive energy to prioritize those elements.

The AHP was formulated to counter those situations, and is a mathematically-based theory.

It employs two key aspects: (1) data from the various variables that make up the decision, and (2) judgments about those variables.

Analytic Hierarchy Process (continued)

The AHP requires taking the following steps:1. Structuring the decision into a hierarchical model2. Pairwise comparison of all objects and alternative

solutions.

The form of the model has four elements:1. Goal – the desired outcome2. Criteria – elements that comprise the goal3. Subcriteria – elements inside the criteria4. Alternatives – solutions or choices available

This format allows decision makers to examine every part of a complex problem.

Group Techniques

These techniques focus on enhancing creativity in multiparticipant situations.One widely used mechanism is the Nominal Group Technique which builds on the concept of brainstorming. The six major steps of the NGT are in Table 16-4.Another technique is the Delphi Method. It uses several rounds of user participation, with pauses between for summarizing. The key difference between Delphi and NGT is that the participants are anonymous.

Creativity and the Role of Technology

Until recently, there was little empirical evidence that technology either enhanced or inhibited creativity.

In effect, it was shown that the process imposed on the decision maker was the primary cause of enhanced creativity.

Lately, research has shown that when appropriate creativity-enhancing processes are combined with effective technology, the results are markedly greater.

What is an Intelligent Software Agent?

To assist in organizing the characteristics of agents, we can conceptualize them as members of three primary divisions:

1. Agent theory – answers the question of what an agent is as well as the mathematics for representing them.

2. Agent architecture – conceptualizes the software engineering models.

3. Agent languages – focuses on the development and deployment of software languages for programming and experimenting with agents.

Characteristics of an ISA

Table below summarizes the current range of definitions for intelligent agents and their basic assumptions.

Common identifying characteristics of these are:

Autonomy Reactivity Personalizability

Discourse Risk and Trust Graceful degradation

Mobility Cooperation Anthropomorphism

Identifying Characteristics of Agents

Autonomy – once initiated must exercise control over its own actions.

Reactivity – must sense changes in environment and respond in timely fashion.

Personalizability – must be educable in the task at hand.

Discourse and cooperation – some form of two-way feedback is required. Also, an agent may need to invoke another agent to complete a task.

Identifying Characteristics of Agents (cont.)

Risk, trust, and domain – must trust the agent to do its task, which has some risk. To minimize this, the user needs to know just where to apply the agent.

Graceful degradation – if the agent has some difficulty communicating with the user, it should be able to do some of the tasks.

Identifying Characteristics of Agents (cont.)

Anthropomorphism – the “humanlike” properties of the agent. One example (next slide) is the concept of an avatar, which represents a principle or view of life.

Mobility – some agents can move from machine to machine or platform to platform.

Advantages of Transportable Agents

1. Efficiency – use fewer resources since they move computation to the data.

2. Fault tolerance – do not require continuous connection to a machine.

3. Convenient paradigm – hide the channels of communication but not the location of the computation.

4. Customization – allow clients and servers to extend each other’s functionality.

A Taxonomy by Level of Intelligence

Lee, et al, developed a classification based on the level of intelligence.Level 0 – retrieve documents under

straight orders, given the exact location.Level 1 – conduct a user-initiated search

activity that can use key words.Level 2 – maintain profiles on user. Can

monitor information sources and notify users.

Level 3 – agents learn and deduce from user-specified profiles.

The Types of Problems ISAs Can Solve

Agents can be used to monitor information sources and report back whenever a keyword list is “hit”.

News releases can be examined for new developments in key product markets.

An agent at a help desk can record basic information on a problem and use it to retrieve documents from a database.

Three Application Examples

1. Customer help desk – an agent listens to the user and makes suggestions before involving the help technician.

2. Web browser agent – tracks what sites were visited and keeps a bookmark list. Can also show the sequences of pages followed.

3. Shopping assistant – after learning the user’s preferences, looks at online malls for items of interest.

Intelligent Software Agents in e-Business

In their early days, e-commerce agents did not do well because people were hesitant to turn them loose. That is not so now.

One application is the automated collaborated filtering used at sites such as Amazon

Another is the merchant brokering agent which compares prices for a user-specified product.

Future e-Commerce Applications

Whether agents appear in an evolutionary or revolutionary manner depends on the future architect of the Internet.

One argument is about whether agents will become competitive or cooperative.

A future shift towards more open systems will also affect the legal treatment of automated electronic commerce.