Understanding Big Picture and Its Challenges: Experts and Decision Makers Perspectives

The big picture of an organization plays an important role in providing insight into the decision making process. Thus, the objectives of this paper are to investigate how experts and decision makers obtain the features of the big picture, and then identify related challenges (problems and issues). Data analysis and interpretation show that experts and decision makers gain the big picture through a process of collaboration. Basically there are four main sequences in the collaboration process of constructing the big picture. These are: (i) understanding the big picture requirements, (ii) extracting content from the tools, (iii) collaborating on pieces of information and (iv) using the collaborative information for decision making. In addition, the challenges of attaining the big picture were identified and then clustered into the 3 main components from the perspective of knowledge visualization (KV) on user perception, namely cognition, perception and communication. Data was collected using semi structured interviews following qualitative methods. The sketching technique was used in the one-to-one interviews to represent mental models which are important for later use in the design stage.