| Decision making processes are getting more and more complex. These processes are generally being confronted with so called chaotic complex environments, e.g. environments that constantly change in reaction to different causes that are not easily influenced. This greatly increases the possibilities for making the wrong choices, resulting in enormous damage, for society and financially. Enhanced complexity and increased risks makes the dependency of industry and organizations on support to come to the right decisions essential. Employment of Collaborative Decision Support Systems, a combination of innovative intelligent agents, self learning and human-computer interface technology, can prevent that chaos in the environment leads to chaos in the decision making processes. This analysis has lead to the ICIS program (Interactive Collaborative Information Systems). ICIS is an initiative of nine leading parties in this technology field. It clusters the main technology strengths of the Dutch industrial and scientific knowledge infrastructure in this field in a national network and enables a knowledge leap through strong research clusters and a knowledge transfer program, resulting in high added value economic growth. The objective of ICIS is to generate a strategic impulse for the Dutch scientific and industrial knowledge position in intelligent collaborative information systems technology. This impulse is given through 4 Research Clusters and a Knowledge Transfer program, formulated by top researchers from science and industry. ICIS will ensure the realization of the future potential of decision support technology as a source of economic growth in a highly productive, sustainable, knowledge driven economy. Furthermore, ICIS aims to strengthen the Dutch knowledge position in the global environment of intelligent systems technology. The main reasons for the ICIS project are: To maintain and strengthen the - up to now - strong intelligent systems technology position of the involved scientific/industrial groups in the Netherlands; To ensure the future availability of well trained academics for Dutch intelligent systems industry; To strengthen the Dutch knowledge infrastructure through a comprehensive knowledge transfer program, leading to industrial applications. |
