Enabling Decision Support Services inside virtual learning environments

Decision-making processes are more and more important today, and are pervading our information systems. In this paper, we present an analysis of how and where this type of processes may be found inside virtual learning environments, and how we have created the respective tools to implement them. The reference point is a virtual community platform that we have created and developed along the years, used in our University and in many public and private organizations. The platform is oriented towards the support of collaborative processes, where of course eLearning is one of the most important, but not the only one. In the integration of these collaboration services with the information system of the hosting organization, many situations appeared where a set of decision support processes would have needed, and these processes would have had a great improvement if implemented inside the services provided by our platform. This paper describes the rationale behind the creation of these software services, some characteristics of their implementations and the results obtained inside the organizations.