Participation And Learning In Dss Development
...to the 77th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Animal Science: Indianapolis, Indiana, July 23-25 1999
Introduction
The topic I am going to discuss was not of my choosing, but suggested by the organizers of this symposium. I say this because I do not think that I can make any significant contribution to the serious problems involved. I nevertheless accepted the invitation to speak about it because I believe that in this respect we are all more or less in the same boat. I take it that our topic is a kind of euphemism for the issue of better returns for our R, D & E dollar. But I shall try to approach our topic with some wider issues in mind. Essentially, the challenge is to answer the question “why have computer-based decision support tools?”, and to set the scene for a discussion on how to better develop and use DSS. A recent review by Lynch et al. (1999) suggests that the record of success is poor and that greater effort to consider the end user is required to develop systems both relevant and useful to agricultural enterprises, and that will be the focus of this paper.
Awareness of the role of the social system is barely evident in work such as Dalton (1982) but has been growing in the last 20 years as farmers and their families have become important in farming systems research (Dent and McGregor, 1994). Girard and Hubert (1999) stress that in order to develop decision support tools that will assist farmers, advisors need to gain a clear understanding of the way these farms function. They favour knowledge-based systems as an effective modeling methodology to enable analysis of the operation of individual farms before you can move to produce technical or economic diagnosis. The models highlight the diversity of management (decision) styles. Similar knowledge-based approaches are used by Kockman et al. (1995a, 1995b). Walker and Johnson...
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