Improving Decision Quality in High-Tech System Design: An In-Depth Study Leveraging Industry Expertise

Technological advancement is driven by the development of high-tech systems. However, growing demands on technology lead to more system complexity and to complexity in developing organizations. Therefore, developing these high-tech systems requires systems engineering and high-quality decision-making to balance high performance requirements and a short time to market. In this work, we explore how to improve decision quality within the context of a partner company from the semiconductor industry that deals with these challenges daily. We use triangulation of literature, a survey of 93 systems engineers from the company, and case studies of twelve decisions at the same company. The results highlight three main aspects pertaining to decision quality, namely (1) focusing on the preparation of the decision, (2) gathering the right knowledge and information, and (3) prioritizing (pre-decision) stakeholder alignment. These results will be used to develop a support for the preparation of high-tech systems design decisions, focusing on what knowledge is required and where that knowledge comes from. We found that these are the most important aspects for improving decision quality in high-tech systems development with growing complexity.