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                          DSS News
                       by D. J. Power
                November 19, 2000 -- No. 15
         A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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Check the HTML/Programming Links page at http://dssresources.com
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Featured:
* DSS Wisdom
* Ask Dan! -- Are there Decision Support Systems for new product         
      management?
* Call for Papers -- 2001 Informing Science, Krakow; Due November 30,    
           2000
* What's New at DSSResources.COM
* DSS News Stories
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We have more than 2100 unique visitors each week at DSSResources.COM 
and more than 360 subscribers to this newsletter. Please forward this 
email to people interested in Decision Support Systems. 
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DSS Wisdom
"Finally, decision acts, while not devoid of environmental impingements, 
are human events.  Various types of hardware, such as various types of 
automatic data-processing equipment, may be employed to aid the 
decision-making process.  Such mechanical devices enhance the speed, 
capacity, and accuracy of evaluations, and they may replace certain 
personnel who perform specific acts contributing to administrative 
decisions.  Nonetheless, even the best of the hardware must be 
programmed by man and the forthcoming computations must be assessed by 
the responsible person. (pp. 30-31)"
from Shull, Fremont A., Andre L. Delbecq, and Larry L. Cummings. 
Organizational Decision Making. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1970. 
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Ask Dan!
Are there Decision Support Systems for new product management?
Subject: DSS in new product management
Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 23:19:06 +0200
From: Emre Tavsancil
To: power@dssresources.com
Hi Mr. Power
 
My name is Emre TAVSANCIL and I have been studying Industrial 
Engineering since 1996 in Istanbul TURKEY. I found your site while 
searching for information about DSS. I am currently working on a 
project which is about "DSS for a new product management". I need some 
information on this subject, like "how to decide?" and "when decide?" 
about a new product.  
Can you help me for this case?
Thank you very much, sincerely yours.
Hi Emre--
I think new product management is an excellent task for end-to-end 
decision support, but we're not there yet.  As many as 80% of new 
product introductions fail and using DSS can potentially reduce this 
failure rate or increase the success rate for new products. An 
integrated DSS can support the identification, evaluation and 
introduction of new products.
DSS can help most with incremental changes like product category and 
product line extensions or product modifications, but I think DSS can 
also help with creating and managing "new-to-the-world" product ideas.
I'm sure that decision aids and special-purpose DSS have been used in 
each stage of the product development cycle, including idea generation, 
idea screening, concept development and testing, marketing strategy 
development, business analysis, product development, test marketing, and 
commercialization. At each stage, managers decide whether an idea should 
be further developed or dropped. This binary "go-no go" decision should 
be and often is a fact-based decision.
A number of software products have been developed to support idea 
generation and one particular technique, brainstorming, has been a 
popular Group DSS application. Idea screening often involves using 
checklists and reviews by a new product evaluation committee. DSS can 
facilitate individual and group rating, ranking and screening. 
DSS and decision aids can also assist with the other stages. For example 
business analysis often involves analysis of resources, cost 
projections, break-even analysis, and sales forecasting.
An unscientific scan of titles indicates most new product development 
textbooks take an analytical approach. Many of the tools (Visual 
Mapping, Knowledge Trees) discussed in these books can be incorporated 
in DSS. I don't teach in this area, so others will need to elaborate on 
specific analytical tools.
>From my vantage point, I think the most exciting opportunity is using a 
Web-Based DSS to support what has been called "Simultaneous Product 
Development". Rather than following the stages mentioned above in a 
linear sequence, individuals or teams can work concurrently on some 
tasks and use a Communications-Driven DSS and Intranet to collaborate 
and share analyses. This type of integrated, process DSS may save time 
and increase new product evaluation effectiveness. Recently, Gerber 
Technology announced WebPDM, Product Data Management. Gerber 
customers can use it to improve and accelerate their product development 
process. I haven't tried WebPDM, but you can check the press release at 
DSSResources.COM or visit http://www.gerberscientific.com.
P. S. Please send me your comments or post them to the DSSResources.COM 
Bulletin Board.
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Call for Papers -- 2001 Informing Science, Krakow; Due November 30, 2000
I am trying to organize a track on "Informing Decision
Makers and DSS" for the 2001 Informing Science Conference, June 19-22, 
2001 in Krakow, Poland. If you have something for a broad audience, 
please consider submitting it ...
Paper (full paper or abstract), panel, poster, or workshop proposals
are due November 30, 2000.  Email your submission to me (email
power@dssresources.com ) with a copy to Alka Harriger, Program Chair
(email arharriger@tech.purdue.edu ) by November 30, 2000. You can find 
complete instructions and submission requirements on the conference web 
site (http://is2001.com)
For more details, send me an email.
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What's New! at DSSResources.COM
11/13/2000 Updated and posted Chapter 11 "Building Web-Based and 
Inter-Organizational Decision Support Systems" of the DSS Hyperbook.
11/06/2000 Posted Call for Participation : 2001 Informing Science 
Conference track on "Informing Decision Makers and DSS", June 19-22, 
2001 in Krakow, Poland.
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DSS News Stories - Nov. 06 to Nov. 19, 2000
Note:  The full press releases are available at DSSResources.COM.
11/17/2000 Frost & Sullivan Second Annual Customer Relationship 
Management Conference and Exhibition, Scottsdale, Ariz., January 22-25, 
2001.
11/16/2000 Gerber Technology announced WebPDM, Product Data Management. 
Gerber customers can use it to improve and accelerate their product 
development process.
11/16/2000 The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers 
(ICANN) approved seven new top-level domains, .info for general use, 
biz for businesses, .name for individuals, .pro for professionals, 
museum for museums, .coop for business cooperatives and .aero for the 
aviation industry. Check www.icann.org.
11/15/2000 QueryObject Systems has partnered with Cognos to market its 
Internet data mart technology with PowerPlay and Impromptu.
11/15/2000 Selective Insurance Group and Intranets.com established joint 
marketing and development of Intranet service, mySELECTnet.com, for 
independent agents.
11/15/2000 Openpages, Inc., a provider of content management software, 
announced it joined the Universal Description Discovery and Integration 
(UDDI) project.
11/14/2000 Clickly.com and Decisioneering partner to offer 
Decisioneering software in various flexible pricing and distribution
models.
11/14/2000 SUBWAY Restaurants implemented MapScape.com to support 
decision-making at the corporate and field levels.
11/14/2000 Sagent initiates selling over the Web to the small and medium 
size business market in partnership with Smart Online.
11/14/2000 Gentia software awarded top business intelligence award by DM 
Review.
11/13/2000 Pioneer Investments is using Artificial Life, Inc. technology 
to introduce intelligent 'Bots'.
11/10/2000 Virtual CEO announced Web-Based Strategic Planning package 
for small business.
11/09/2000 NeuralAct offers Neural Forecast Manager to help call center 
managers optimize their workforce staffing.
11/08/2000 Brian Valentine, Microsoft Senior VP, will discuss .NET 
Vision for ISPs at Fall ISPCON 2000 on Nov. 10.
11/07/2000 Sagent Technology introduced complete E-Business Intelligence 
Suite for Solaris.
11/07/2000 PR Firm, Ketchum, launches myKGN Collaborative Portal, 
Knowledge Management system and Extranet.
11/06/2000 Call for Participation: 2001 Informing Science Conference 
track on "Informing Decision Makers and DSS", June 19-22, 2001 in 
Krakow, Poland.
11/06/2000 SGI demonstrated an Itanium processor-based system using 
Linux software at SC2000. 
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