>... We would like to
> establish a Decision Support Center on campus -- a networked computer
> facility programmed to facilitate team brainstorming, priority setting,
> consensus, etc.  We would need funds for hardware software and staff
> development (in terms of facilitating all the teams' sessions).  Any ideas
> and suggestions would be welcome!
>
As perhaps you know, the Group Decision Support Facility concept was
developed at University of Arizona many years ago.  The faculty in
Business Administration at SanDiego State Univ. were among the first (in
California, anyway) to implement the idea.  My own campus has two such
centers, one on Mac, the other on PCs. I have used the PC facility for
something like a focus group and fortunately had a good facilitator.

You have hit the problem on the head: you need equipment that can be
dedicated to this purpose.  One reason to dedicate rather than
multi-task it as a multi-media lab or some other purpose is that the
software is sensitive to malpractice.  You can be put (temporarily) out
of business by clumsiness in a GDS session or in the other off-time
functions.

Another and more important consideration is that competent facilitation
is hard to find.  If I say that the facilitator must transcend
nerdiness, you will have the essence of it.  It takes a special person
comfortable with hardware, the software, AND people to do it well, and
that person must have a constant flow of events to keep up her or his
skills.  You will want to pay facilitators very close to what they are
worth.

The physical repair of the equipment must be excellent.  There is
nothing worse that having a business executive from the community (i.e.,
one of the customers you will inevitably want to use the facility for a
fee or for goodwill) have their station go down just as the process
begins to focus on a decision set.

Finally, our experience is that some groups take to it immediately and
are return customers fairly frequently.  The academic community does not
seem to take to it like the business community does.  No real surprise
there, but the extra negative effect of that is that it plays negatively
into college budget discussions.  I recommend a good environmental scan
of your business community before you jump into this.  Since any GDS
session is essentially a retreat, you might think about a remote
location for the facility, funded by a consortium of interests.

--
James R. Brett, Ph.D., Director
Office of University Research
California State University, Long Beach
562-985-5314 or fax 562-985-8665
http://www.csulb.edu/~research