4.6 Time Zone Differences
There is a complex array of time zones throughout the world. Having global operations makes it harder for companies to have “real-time meetings” and to have overlapping working hours for collaborating employees. But operating in many time zone can create decision support opportunities to reduce decision cycle times and reduce decision “handling costs”. In some situations, the time zone of origin for a transaction matters and in others it is not relevant in decision making. Operating in multiple time zones creates both an opportunity and challenge for collaborative work and communications.
Table 1 summarizes the above global DSS issues and our assessment of the relevance of the issues to specific types of DSS. The perceived importance of an issues is rated as low, moderate, or high. We recognize that such ratings are at best a conjecture at this stage, but they are proposed as a starting point to generate discussion of these issues for various types of DSS.