What is Decisional Episode

This article develops the notion of decisional episodes as a basis for understanding ways in which decisions can be supported. Grounded in and aligned with knowledge management (KM) theory, the resultant perspective on decision support can guide researchers in the generation of research ideas and designs. It can also contribute to practitioners by suggesting architectures and functionalities to consider in the course of developing decision support systems, and by suggesting key issues to resolve in the course of deploying and evaluating a portfolio of decision support systems. Broadly speaking, knowledge management is concerned with efforts to ensure that the right knowledge is available to the right processors at the right time in the right representations for the right cost in order to foster right relationships, decisions, and actions with respect to an entity’s mission. These efforts unfold in various contexts such as designing, communicating, researching, and decision making. Our focus here is on the latter.