| In recent years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has invested substantial resources into the research and development of computerized decision-support systems (DSS), with the aim of supporting more sustainable development and water resource management at the community level. As documented in Chapter 2, this strategy is firmly ingrained within the agency's research and development program and is part of a broader shift away from media-specific risk-assessment and regulation towards a more de-centralized and collaborative approach, which seeks to encourage development that is socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable through a combination of multi-objective problem solving, innovation, and systems-based science and technology. Chapter 3 summarizes the fifty-year evolution of computerized DSS for community development and water resource management, including the 'bottleneck' between increasing DSS development and the persistent lack of adoption among community practitioners. Existing conceptual models and common methods of researching the (non-)adoption of DSS have provided little practical insight into the why this bottleneck exists, and what if anything can be done to overcome it. Chapter 4 details a comparative evaluation of three DSS developed to assist local land use planners in predicting the impact of land use change on stormwater runoff. The evaluation highlights tradeoffs between system attributes related to three constructs: 'legitimacy', 'organizational fit', and 'programmability', as well as the effect of specific design alternatives and a potentially 'optimal' overall design. Chapters 5 and 6 describe a mixed-methods investigation of the empirical validity, historical development, and community adoption of a DSS developed to aid local public health professionals in predicting water quality at Great Lakes beaches. This investigation included an empirical validation of the 'Virtual Beach' DSS, a 'tracer study' of the its ten-year R&D process, and a series of in-depth case studies of system's (non-)adoption among five coastal communities. In addition to providing grounded theory on the (non-) adoption of DSS, this study illustrated the methodological advantages and practical benefits of conducting long-term, process-oriented research on DSS (non-)adoption, as well as the steep institutional barriers to this approach. |
