Multimedia as an enabling technology for enhancing organizational memory to support decision making
Creators: name: Lim, Kai Hin
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: The decision making literature has portrayed human decision making as imprecise, relying too heavily on unproven heuristics, and full of shortcomings. This dissertation focuses on three of the difficulties of human decision making that can be assisted by multimedia technology. They are: poor comprehension of information, coping with ambiguous information, and first impression bias. Poor comprehension of information is the inability of a decision maker to comprehend important details when large amount of information needs to be considered (Kahneman, 1973). Coping with ambiguous information is caused by the lack of a complete understanding of ambiguous information (Weick, 1979). First impression bias is caused by people's tendency to base their decisions on their initial impression of the event (Asch, 1946). We drew upon research from the multimedia literature and identified three unique characteristics of multimedia presentations, namely complementary cues, rich language, and authentic context. The theories from multimedia and decision making literatures were applied to the domain of Organization Memory Systems (OMS) to study how OMS can be enhanced to better support decision making. OMS are systems that store information from an organization's past to support present decisions. We suggest that through the use of complementary cues, rich language, and authentic context, multimedia is capable of storing and presenting more information in OMS, as compared to text-based OMS, in a way that may alleviate the three difficulties (poor comprehension of information, coping with ambiguous information, and first impression bias). Three experiments, which contrasted a text-based OMS to a multimedia OMS, were conducted. Each focused on one of the difficulties of decision making and investigated how multimedia presentations can be used to alleviate these difficulties. Results on comprehension of information demonstrate that the use of multimedia facilitates the retention and subsequent recall of organized facts, but not isolated facts. Further, better retention and recall of organized facts lead to a higher ability to make inferences. Results on coping with ambiguous information show a task-media fit relationship. For less-equivocal tasks, text-based OMS and multimedia OMS are equally effective in reducing perceived ambiguity levels, although text-based OMS required less time than multimedia OMS to perform the task. On the other hand, for more-equivocal tasks, only multimedia OMS was able to reduce perceived ambiguity levels. Multimedia OMS was also found to be useful in reducing more than text-based OMS, but not eliminating, the influence of first impression bias when information that is inconsistent with the first impression is presented in multimedia format. Overall, this dissertation demonstrated that multimedia can be used to further enhance the capability of the current text-based OMS to better support decision making. This is achieved through the ability of multimedia OMS to alleviate three of the difficulties of decision making discussed above.