The problem was two-fold. Make a good decision, and then get buy-in. Fast!

A small group of IS experts needed to make a good decision on what desktop operating system the business should move to (from Windows 95) and when. It was also necessary to get support for this decision from business managers who would be impacted by it, and also IS people who had an opinion but had not been directly involved in making the decision.


As there was no off-the-shelf knowledge base available for this problem, it had to be created by the Zeneca IS experts themselves using the Assistum Visual Editor. Two one-day workshops were held. At the first, the factors to be considered were identified and clustered, and a first-cut knowledge base produced. At the second, the knowledge base was used for each scenario (e.g. Windows 98 in 1999) which led to further refinements to the knowledge base.

 Finally all the scenarios were tested against the knowledge base and a decision made. Maps of all the scenarios were printed showing the conclusions and the drivers, with positive reasons in green and negatives in red.

The original intention was to display each scenario to the Steering Group (of Business and IS Managers) allowing them to challenge any judgements and explore the consequences using the software to get their understanding and buy-in.

In practice, it was sufficient to describe the decision-making process to them, the conclusion the experts had reached and reasons why. "It was amazingly well-received"