Designing a decision support system for urban infrastructure decision making

The vision of utilizing information technology to make government more effective, efficient and responsive to its citizens has long captivated government officials and the public alike. This chapter describes a project to design a decision support system (DSS) for planning and budgeting infrastructure in a major U.S. city. The system was projected to help with decision making related to numerous aspects of the city's infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, and waste water) and to include input from multiple stakeholders to infrastructure decisions, including relevant government agencies, the public, builders, community leaders, and the city government. The design of the DSS had to address nine challenges which formed significant barriers to realization of the system. In the end a scaled back prototype was created because the challenges proved too difficult to overcome with current technology and resources. We discuss the nine challenges and some avenues for future DSSs that might help to address them.