Thoughts about GSS

In the last lecture there was talk about Group Support systems and how some of them even need separate facilitators, who before meeting plan the meeting and what tools to use and during the meeting uses the tools. This whole facilitator-idea made me wonder whether all the fancy GSS really help the meeting. I mean, if you need a special trained professional just to run them, wouldn't it just be easier to hold the meeting in a old fashioned way?

Of course, I can see the benefits of - for example - computer counting votes or other manual things that would take plenty of time if conducted manually. But if I imagine a system that would do that or other similar simple tasks, it hardly seems like a system that would need a facilitator to run it. Of course, this is all just thoughts based on how I imagine GSS's work. I don't have any personal experience with GSS's, and I don't really know what kind of tools they provide or how hard they are to use.

Other thing that raised a thought was study by De Vreede et al.[1] where they studied causes for GSS meeting failures. Most of the failures had something to do with problems with goals and far less common were the ones with problems with technology. So most of the problems seem originate from the participants, not the tools. Just like in Jami's post here, it seems that it all comes to the people using the tools.

References:
[1] G.-J. De Vreede, R.M. Davison & R.O. Brigss, How a silver bullet may lose its shine. Comm. ACM 46:8, August 2003, 96-101. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/859670.859676