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With the flood of data produced by today's information systems, something must be done to allow business decision-makers to extract the information the data contains. The recent advances in visualization technologies provide the capability to begin to use human visual/spatial abilities to solve the abstract problems found in business. If business problems can be visualized with an appropriate representation, then it may be possible to use innate spatial/visual abilities to allow the business decision-maker to separate the "wheat from the chaff." This tutorial surveys the issues related to applying visualization technologies to business problem solving.

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Cognitive diversity has been shown to positively affect team performance, especially in the early stages of strategic planning. We report on a process that explicitly identifies cognitive factions; sub-groups of individuals with diverse views and beliefs within a top management team (TMT). Our group-driven causal mapping process provides greater clarity to understanding the underlying belief structures of the cognitive factions through the adoption of givens-means-ends (GME) and casual path analysis. We achieve this clarity by having members of the TMT define and agree on the strategic factors before they construct their individual cause maps. Through this process, based on the relationships shared among the team members, we can readily merge individual cause maps into cognitive faction maps. By employing GME and casual path analysis to the cognitive faction maps, we can surface the differences in beliefs among the different cognitive factions within the TMT. We demonstrate our process using a 13-person TMT from an information technology services firm. The cause maps of the cognitive factions directly represent some of the issues and assumptions that need to be discussed and debated among the members of the TMT, thus increasing the potential for cognitive faction beliefs to enhance decision-making. We also find that cognitive factions relate to task roles of the team members, providing further evidence that different beliefs develop in different areas of the organization.

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