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DSS News
by D. J. Power
December 16, 2001 -- Vol. 2, No. 26
A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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Check Wasyluk and Saaty's U.S. Dept. of Veteran's Affairs
case with Team Expert Choice at DSSResources.COM
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Featured:
* Ask Dan! - What happened at DSSResources.COM in 2001?
* What's New at DSSResources.COM
* DSS News Stories
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This newsletter has more than 730 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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Ask Dan!
What happened at DSSResources.COM in 2001?
"It's NOT easy to make money with your computer at home!" I got this
message in an email shortly after receiving a question about "how are
you doing" with DSSResources.COM. So this is a status report.
During the past year, many things have changed at DSSResources.COM. An
important change has been moving from an advertising-based business
model to primarily a subscriber-based business model. On March 20, 2001
we created a Subscriber Zone and outsourced processing of transactions
for subscriptions to Verotel. Some of the content at DSSResources.COM
has been slowly migrated to the Subscriber Zone. Our approach is to
maintain useful "free content" and provide exceptional premium content
to subscribers. We have made this transition gradually and our plan is
to move more content into the Subscriber Zone in the first quarter of
2002 and to add additional premium content. We also hope to begin
marketing DSSResources.COM and to create more partnerships with DSS
researchers. The number of subscribers has been increasing each month
and we had more subscriptions in November than in any prior month.
Subscriptions are slowing in December, but we hope to see a rebound in
January 2002.
The results of this change to a subscriber model have been generally
positive. Traffic at DSSResources.COM has been increasing throughout
2001. The number of subscribers to DSS News has nearly doubled from
about 400 for the January 2, 2001 newsletter to 740 for this newsletter.
The outsourcing of distribution of DSS News to Topica has been
generally satisfactory, but the ad revenues are insignificant. The list
management is easy, and we plan to continue that relationship. Our
advertising agency, Burst! Media, served DSSResources.COM approximately
800,000 ads in 2001. However, only 230,000 of these were paid ads, the
others were public service ads or ads for DSSResources.COM. The revenues
increased in October and November, but the CPM payout is meager.
We contracted with Verio for another year of web hosting. Their
reliability has been good and their server has been able to handle the
traffic. Verio statistics provide us with a good view of our visitors.
The statistics indicate that over the past three and a half months, we
have served nearly half a million pages to almost 30,000 distinct IP
addresses.
The DSS Career Center is off to a slow start. We entered into a
partnership with TechEngine on July 23, 2001. The number of new jobs
related to DSS is not what it was a year ago, but we encourage DSS News
readers to visit the DSS Career Center and to recommend it to their
friends. The DSS Book Store affiliated with Barnes and Noble.com
receives about 150 page views per month, but the number of books
purchased is not meeting expectations and we keep the page as a service
to the DSS community.
In 2001, 26 issues of DSS News were emailed and posted at
DSSResources.COM. The issues contained DSS Wisdom, Ask Dan! and more
than 300 news headlines. The Ask Dan! topics included concepts like
analytical software, business intelligence, knowledge management and
document-driven DSS. The most controversial columns focused on business
intelligence. Some new features at DSSResources.COM this year include
the For Developers and For Researchers pages, featured cases and
contributed articles, the Document-Driven DSS page, and the DSS Roulette
page. DSSResources.COM promoted the AMCIS 2001 DSS Minitrack and the
IFIP WG 8.3 conference scheduled for Cork, Ireland in July 2002.
Well from a personal perspective, I'm hoping that with some site
redesign, group course subscriptions and the publication of my DSS book
that subscriptions will increase. DSSResources.COM should have its first
group subscription for Spring 2002. DSSResources.COM has been getting
many one time subscribers and I'm hoping that too will change. On-going
subscriptions can provide a much better revenue stream. DSSResources.COM
is currently offering free two month subscriptions to faculty who are
considering adopting the site for class use. Faculty that have students
subscribe receive an annual subscription. DSS research labs can also
partner with DSSResources.COM and receive a commission on each
subscription transaction they refer to DSSResources.COM from their Web
site.
So what's the bottom line? Running this site is fun and it fits well
with my DSS research interests. My son and I have learned a lot about
eCommerce and eBusiness first hand. The expenses are modest, but so are
the revenues.
Many thanks to the following vendors who provided permission to post
cases and articles at DSSResources.COM in 2001: Alphablox, Inc.,
arcplan, Artemis Intl., Brio, Inc., Business Objects, Inc., Comshare,
Inc., DataBeacon, Inc., Decisioneering, Inc., Dimensional Insight, Inc.,
Expert Choice, Inc., Facet Decision Making, Microstrategy, Inc., Nucleus
Research, and Palisade Corp.
HAPPY HOLIDAYS from Dan, Alex, Ben, Greg, and Carol Power
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What's New at DSSResources.COM
12/14/2001 Posted case by Wasyluk, O. John, and Daniel Saaty,
"Developing a Portfolio Approach to Capital Investment: A Case Study in
Re-Engineering Resource Allocation at the U.S. Department of Veteran's
Affairs", Expert Choice, Inc., 2001, URL DSSResources.COM/cases/dva.htm.
12/07/2001 Added translation capability from FreeTranslation.com to page
footers.
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DSS News Stories: November 28 to December 13
12/13/2001 Informatica Analytics delivery platform wins first place at
Giga's Emerging Technology Conference.
12/10/2001 United Airlines standardizes on Brio Software to address its
BI needs.
12/10/2001 SAS releases new versions of seven SAS® solutions.
12/06/2001 Retail sector selecting MicroStrategy’s BI software as
standard.
12/06/2001 Prediction Dynamics launched beta test of Crucible, a
financial time-series modeling application.
12/05/2001 ABC Technologies signs multi-million dollar strategic OEM
agreement with ProClarity corporation.
12/03/2001 Weiser Lock implements ProClarity BI solution to unlock
savings and reduce reporting burden.
12/03/2001 Citrix teams with Business Objects to help Citrix Portal
Software customers access, analyze and profit from their data.
11/29/2001 An independent survey shows MicroStrategy’s customers are the
most loyal.
11/28/2001 Sun Microsystems and Sybase set reference architecture for
25-plus terabyte, high performance, low TCO data warehouses.
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This newsletter is available online in the Subscriber Zone
at http://dssresources.com/newsletters/ .
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DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2001 by D. J. Power. Please send your email to
power@dssresources.com. You have previously subscribed to the DSS News Mailing
List.
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