Task-centered research: understanding, augmenting and discovering managerial expertise

A research framework, called task-centered research, is described for studying managerial expertise in complex task environments. A difficult, complex, and real-world task forms the focus for research aimed at understanding reasoning expertise in management. Three research efforts within the framework are presented to illustrate how it can be instantiated in practice and in the context of managerial decision-making. One effort is explicitly oriented to the study of reasoning in experts and novices. The second involves the construction of an expert system that both models the expert´s methods and augments managerial decision-making. The third effort concerns the application of machine learning techniques for discovering rules that form the knowledge-base of expert judgement