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DSS News
D. J. Power, Editor
March 14, 2004 -- Vol. 5, No. 6
A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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Check the article by Tom Spradlin
"A Lexicon of Decision Making" at DSSResources.COM
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Featured:
* DSSResources.COM Stats
* Ask Dan! - What is your analysis of the history and current
status of DSS?
* What's New? at DSSResources.COM
* DSS News Releases
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DAMA International Symposium & Wilshire Meta-Data Conference
- Keynote Speaker Chris Date - May 2-6, 2004, Century Plaza
Hotel, Los Angeles. Details at
http://www.wilshireconferences.com/MD2004/index.htm
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Read the Association for Information Systems SIG DSS Newsletter at
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Ask Dan!
by Dan Power
What is your analysis of the history and current status
of DSS?
This Ask Dan! is based upon the transcript of an interview Stephen
Fitzgerald had with Dan Power in July 2001. Excerpts from the interview
were published in Fitzgerald's executive guidebook titled "Decision
Making".
The introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s led some
people to conclude that technology had reached the level where we could
do just about anything in terms of providing decision support to
managers. By about 1986-87, managers became disillusioned with the
realized capabilities and the promises that vendors and information
systems staffs had made about computerized decision support systems.
In the early 1990s, there was a slowdown and a waiting period in
implementing DSS, EIS and GDSS as graphical user interfaces like
Macintosh and Windows 3.1 were introduced and new decision support
software products were developed for those interfaces. Then the
introduction of data warehouses and what I call data-driven decision
support systems opened up new possibilities for providing
enterprise-wide DSS for managers. I think decision support has really
"taken off" since the Web and the Internet reinvigorated some tech firms
and forced them to move their software onto a new platform. That's all
happened since 1995.
Today you can find development software for all of the different types
of decision support systems that you might want to build. Development
software is a toolkit that allows one to add content and customize the
application to provide specific decision support to targeted users. It's
a set of building blocks that application developers can use to develop
more specific DSS for companies, and our toolkits are much more powerful
than they ever were before. You may still need to hire consultants to
provide training, etc., but I think the capabilities are worth it.
In one way or another over the past 30 years, we have built DSS to help
with many routine and semi-structured decisions in business decision
processes. Part of the difficulty is that DSS developers have not always
used the technology to make the process more efficient or more
effective. Most of the DSS applications that were built in the past need
to be reexamined, we need to go back to what we have done, as well as
look for what's innovative and new in DSS.
From what I can tell, most companies don't have to look very far to find
an application for one of the various types of DSS. The challenge is to
figure out the ones that will give them the highest return in the short
run. And I'm not sure that building more data warehouse systems is going
to be the way for most firms to go. It's easy for such large, complex
systems to go unused because managers don't know what they can do with
them, and they are very expensive to create. You can find cost effective
DSS, but you can also build systems that will not be cost effective. It
has to be one of the issues that you look at. Some decisions and
decision processes don't justify large investments in computing
technology.
It's easy to neglect the issue of what kind of a decision support system
a manager wants to use and will use. A computerized decision support
system is often added to an existing process, rather than looking at
what the tasks really are that need to be performed, and what the role
of a DSS could be.
Also, most of our DSS are developed in isolation. I don't think that
when analysts consider proposed DSS that they critically examine how the
DSS will be used. Typically there's a project sponsor who has heard that
a competitor has implemented a DSS or BI system, and that's the starting
point, rather than beginning from the stand point of examining
organizational decisions and decision processes. DSS development often
starts with a bias.
What I'm pushing is that companies should do a decision process audit
regularly. The audit should focus on how "important" decisions are made
in the company now and examine the processes. There are a number of
consulting firms that audit decision processes. In my DSS book, I put
together some steps to follow in a decision process audit and some DSS
readiness questions that managers can ask themselves about decision
support in their organization.
A lot of DSS development is still about thinking. Looking for
opportunities to put DSS into an organization is a major cognitive task.
Managers should start by finding someone smart to help them look at
organization processes and needs.
The thrust of decision support for the past 30 years has been to realize
that computers are tools, adjuncts to decision-making. They are there to
assist in information retrieval and application of analytical tools to
data, to do the things that computers do best. We try to present the
information in a way that allows people to make better decisions, but
not to have the computer make decisions for people. There are certainly
computerized systems that make decisions - we have them in manufacturing
and power plants, for example - but that's not what DSS is all about.
DSS is about supporting a manager in making decisions as part of a
business process. DSS is about making fact-based decisions in an
organization, monitoring and controlling activities, and supporting
planning. The DSS idea has never been that the software was going to
make decisions for managers.
There has been some resistance to DSS, but there's also been frustration
and the two get intertwined. If you get excited about a decision support
system and you think that it's going to make your job more interesting
because you won't have to do as many clerical tasks and perform
analyses, and then you find that you have to go to extra training
programs, and the system crashes, and you're waiting for a new release
from the IS department, even the people who get excited about the DSS
right away may get turned off. There are always some slow starters that
you have to bring along, but people who are quick to adopt, they can
become frustrated and that leads to resistance.
High cost failures of systems are a problem too. I can't believe that
people don't get very concerned when they read that 40 or 50% of data
warehouse implementations are failures by one or more measures. We
should expect that these systems are going to succeed more than they
fail. Some of these DSS are partial failures - they don't get the
functionality that was promised, or there's a changeover in senior
management and the new managers don't like the new system.
Decision Support Systems probably fail more because of people issues
than because of technology issues. The technology may have done what it
was intended to do, but the failure rate is higher because people got
frustrated with the system. Part of what I've been trying to do is to
tell managers that every DSS is not the same, we've got to look at what
it is we're trying to support. I think if you can talk about the
different systems with managers they can start to see the types of
systems that may make sense for them to use. For example, if they want
to control financial results they can look at what kind of DSS can
support that. If they've got project teams that are geographically
dispersed and that need more input into decision-making, then we can
look at the tools that might support that. But we need to look at the
models and have people look at things in a little more detail than they
have.
I'm excited about the Web. Web-technologies have revitalized DSS and the
possibilities for decision support. I'm excited to get through this
recession. I think we're going to have another big technology boom as
companies decide to use more technology to replace some of the people
that they've decided are too expensive in some of their business
processes, but then their customers will be unhappy because there isn't
anyone to hear their needs. Technology will involve people in decision
making from outside of the organization yet give managers more control
over transactions and businesses processes. I think 10 years from now
managers are going to be better informed decision makers than they've
ever been. They're going to have access to facts - whether they're smart
enough to use that information wisely is still going to be a concern.
The computer is just a tool, DSS is just a tool - like a hammer, you can
still hit your finger with it. And there will be some people who use it
inappropriately, and some people who can't hit a nail to save their
lives. But I'm very optimistic that we'll start to see a transformation
in decision-making as we have in the operations area. So I'm excited to
see the technology recession end, and to start to do more to integrate
technology into our firms. Technology integration will continue to
happen because our population keeps increasing and demands for goods and
services keeps increasing. The only way we can meet that demand is by
using computerized transaction processing and decision support systems.
References
Fitzgerald, S. P., "Decision Making," Capstone Books, 2002.
Fitzgerald interview with Dr. Daniel Power, Thursday, July 26, 2001.
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What's New? at DSSResources.COM
03/05/2004 Posted article by Tom Spradlin, "A Lexicon of Decision
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DSS News - March 1 to March 12, 2004
Read them at DSSResources.COM and search the DSS News Archive
03/11/2004 Retired USAF General McPeak to present at Competitive
Intelligence Forum in Portland, Oregon.
03/11/2004 Home Properties selects CSI - The Center For Data Warehousing
for strategy, vision selection and validation.
03/10/2004 Mindjet announces March Madness contest: pick the winning
teams and win an Acer Tablet PC.
03/10/2004 ePocrates praises national patient safety week's focus on
reducing medical errors.
03/09/2004 pbviews unveils performance maps and scalability enhancements
in version 6.0 of its widely deployed performance management software
solution.
03/09/2004 Documentum eRoom wins Network World's 'Best of the Tests'
award.
03/08/2004 Autodesk releases Autodesk Pre-Plan and Pre-Plan Command
software for emergency response planning.
03/08/2004 Documentum eRoom Enterprise delivers collaborative content
management.
03/08/2004 FileNet announces Team Collaboration Manager, latest addition
to industry-leading ECM product family.
03/08/2004 KnowNow and Accius deliver web-based whiteboard collaboration
platform to Natsource.
03/08/2004 U.S. Borax adopts MicroStrategy as enterprise-wide business
intelligence standard.
03/08/2004 RMS releases version 4.0 of its Climetrix(R) weather
derivatives trading and risk management system.
03/05/2004 Albertsons launches RFID technology program to improve
merchandising and supply chain management efficiencies.
03/04/2004 Top IT decision makers shortlist Grid as strategic IT
investment for 2004, says new survey.
03/04/2004 American companies failing to address retention of e-mail,
electronic documents.
03/04/2004 Heinz selects Ariba Spend Management as part of global cost
reduction program.
03/04/2004 Mindjet releases MindManager X5 Pro 5.1 to provide Tablet PC
support and enterprise application integration.
03/03/2004 New clinical handheld application ePocrates Dx(TM) offers
doctors seamless access to drug and disease information.
03/03/2004 LiveOffice debuts IMConferencing's Meeting Command Center.
03/03/2004 Oracle(R) Database 10g on Linux sets world record for three
terabyte data warehousing benchmark.
03/03/2004 Trimble adds Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 software for
Pocket PCs to its GeoExplorer series of Rugged GPS handhelds.
03/01/2004 Leading european retailer Fnac adopts MicroStrategy as
business intelligence standard for enterprise reporting.
03/01/2004 SGI Onyx Systems provide visualization power for Japan's
Earth Simulator.
03/01/2004 Announcement: Innovations in Teaching Decision Support
Systems Development; NSF supported summer 2004 faculty workshops.
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