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DSS News
by D. J. Power
August 26, 2001 -- Vol. 2, No. 18
A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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Featured:
* DSS Wisdom
* Report from Boston - DCI Portals/AMCIS 2001
* What's New at DSSResources.COM
* DSS News Stories
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This newsletter has more than 625 subscribers from
50 countries. Please forward this newsletter to people interested in
Decision Support Systems or suggest they visit DSSResources.COM.
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Join us at IFIP WG 8.3 Conference on Decision Support Systems (DSS),
Decision Support in the Internet Age, Cork, Ireland,
July 4-7, 2002. Paper submissions due November 30, 2001.
Check http://afis.ucc.ie/dsiage2002/.
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DSS Wisdom
Aristotle noted in the Nichomachean Ethics, "We call in others to aid us
in deliberation on important questions, distrusting ourselves as not
being equal to deciding." (p. 56)
from Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics. Trans. by Sir David Ross. London:
Oxford University Press, 1966.
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Report from Boston - DCI Portals/AMCIS 2001
From Monday, July 30, 2001 to Sunday, August 5, the Power family visited
Boston. My wife and two of my children were playing the tourist role and
I was busy trying to blend applied technology issues and product
demonstrations with research studies, philosophic questions and social
events.
From Monday to Wednesday the DCI Portals conference (www.dci.com) was
held at the Hynes Center. Colin White of DataBase Associates organized
an excellent overview program. In his opening keynote, he said a portal
"provides internal and external users with an integrated, personalized
and secure Web-based interface to business content" including
information, applications and collaboration services. Some of the vendor
products met White's criteria and some still have major limitations.
InfoImage (http://www.infoimage.com/) provided me a complementary
conference registration so I tried to make sure I learned more about
their product. On May 23, I had participated in their Webcast about
making decisions with InfoImage Decision Portal 4 and that encounter
started the ball rolling to the DCI Portals conference. Overall, I was
impressed with Decision Portal 4. It is a good starting point for
building an Executive Decision Support environment.
What about the other vendors and the presentations? The vendors were
generally friendly and helpful. The exhibit hall was not crowded so I
made the rounds a few times. The Microsoft Sharepoint server
demonstrations and sessions were especially helpful. As far as
conference sessions, I tried to focus on the company case study
presentations.
So what are the best portal products? I'll try to address this question
in a future Ask Dan! column, but for now if you are shopping for a
portal check InfoImage, Plumtree, Microsoft SharePoint server and Top
Tier by SAP Portals.
The Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2001) was a change
of pace. It began on Thursday at the Westin-Copley Place. In particular
the crowds were much larger and the sales pitch was more subdued. Again
Microsoft had a major booth, but they were pitching visual development
software. The University of Northern Iowa (my day job) funded the AMCIS
2001 part of the trip. Thursday was a light day with workshops, but
Friday started a large program with a mix of technical and managerial
topics. In the Data Management and Decision Support track more than 40
papers were presented in 15 sessions. The sessions spanned the field
from data extraction and warehousing to model building, agents and
collaboration support systems. Web topics were interwoven in many of
the sessions.
I particularly enjoyed chairing the panel on "Philosophical Foundations
of Decision Support Systems" Saturday morning. Panelists Steve Alter,
University of San Francisco, Jim Courtney, University of Central
Florida, Ramesh Sharda, Oklahoma State University, and George Widmeyer,
University of Michigan provided diverse perspectives. We have come so
far in spreading the word about Decision Support Systems, but it seems
we have so much further to go. The back and forth in this session among
panelists and with the audience showed that we still have much to
discuss and assess about supporting decision-makers with technology.
Many thanks to all who participated.
Well the bottom line is that AMCIS 2001 was a great conference. On the
administrative side, I attended the Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting
and we are making progress in creating an Association for Information
Systems (AISnet.org) Special Interest Group (SIG) for Decision Support
Systems (DSS). I anticipate the revised AIS SIGDSS proposal will be
approved at the December meeting of the AIS Council. Jim Courtney,
Ramesh Sharda, Steve Alter, Murray Turoff,
Hugh Watson and Vijayan Sugumaran have volunteered to serve on an
advisory board and to help with organizing tasks. I'll submit an
expanded proposal with proposed officers in mid-October. If you
want to help, send me an email.
The paper sessions "wound down" on Sunday morning, but David Sammon's 8
am presentation titled "The Failure of a Decision Support System in Use:
An Irish Case Study" reminded me that DSS don't solve all problems and
that people need to use and accept a DSS if it is to be successful. The
discussion of the case pointed out that the reasons why DSS do fail are
often hard to decipher and that establishing the criteria for failure
and success of a DSS can be equally difficult.
Next summer AMCIS 2002 will be held in Dallas, August 9-11.
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What's New at DSSResources.COM
08/25/2001 Added Collins, H., Corporate Portals, to the DSS Book Store.
08/19/2001 Added terms to Glossary.
08/19/2001 Reformatted Classic DSS Books pages and tables of contents.
08/16/2001 Updated Book Store.
08/15/2001 Moved Case Studies from prior months into Subscriber Zone,
moved DSS Hyperbook tutorials and 8 additional tutorials to the
Subscriber Zone.
08/12/2001 Archived DSS News and reindexed site and subscriber search.
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DSS News Stories - August 13-22, 2001
08/22/2001 Quicken 2002 helps consumers make decisions during tough
economic times.
08/21/2001 Xylo study finds trends toward increasing internet usage at
work.
08/21/2001 inSORS and Ford rolled out three-site deployment of IAG2001
Collaborative Conferencing System.
08/20/2001 Vality® Technology announced INTEGRITY for Informatica to
cleanse and repurpose data.
08/17/2001 Call for Papers: Informing Science 2002, Cork, IE, June
19-21, 2002. Papers due Nov. 30.
08/15/2001 Hewitt Associates extends Cognos® extranet worldwide.
08/15/2001 Download ABSolute, a general-purpose multi-attribute DSS
under development at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.
08/14/2001 SAS forecasts record growth in data warehousing demand.
08/14/2001 Tenrox introduced Projeca 6.5, a Workflow based enterprise
optimization software package for project and service oriented
organizations.
08/13/2001 SPSS introduced presentation-quality report writer.
08/13/2001 Business Objects leads in Business Intelligence market share.
08/13/2001 Active Decisions services to offer shoppers automated sales
assistance on Yahoo! Shopping.
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http://dssresources.com/newsletters/ .
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DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2001 by D. J. Power. Please send your email to
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