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DSS News
D. J. Power, Editor
October 26, 2003 -- Vol. 4, No. 22
A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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Check case by ePeople staff, "Customer-focused
decision support at OpSource"
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Featured:
* Report from IAADS in Omaha
* What's New at DSSResources.COM?
* DSS News Releases
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Report from IAADS in Omaha
by Dan Power
Editor, DSSResources.COM
Omaha, Nebraska is a "booming" city on the banks of the Missouri River,
about a 4 hour drive from my home in Cedar Falls, IA. Omaha was the
setting Thursday, October 16th and Friday, October 17th for the 2003
IAADS Thought Leaders Summit. The two-day conference was intended to
bring together "world leaders in decision support to share ideas and
explore the cutting edge of the field". You may be asking "What is a
thought leaders conference?" or "Who invited people to the summit?"
Basically IAADS is Jerry Wagner's "show". He hopes to create more dialog
on advanced decision support and create a virtual organization to work
collaboratively on "interesting, leading-edge" decision support
projects. Jerry invites people to attend; he sends out the invitations.
Some readers may recall my report in DSS News from the 2002 summit.
Jerry has made an enormous contribution to the computerized decision
support field for more than 25 years. His entrepreneuring with IFPS and
Execucom in the early 1980's demonstrated that managers would "buy"
computerized, model-driven decision support software. Jerry is a
soft-spoken, modest guy who is working hard to advance the field of
decision support.
I arrived Wednesday at the DoubleTree Hotel and attended the evening
IAADS reception sponsored by Booz Allen. The chatter was generally
relaxed and social, but Wes Barnes (UT-Austin) and I had a chance to
discuss his research on direct search optimization techniques for
vehicle routing and military logistics. Promptly at 8pm I left the
reception to watch the Cubs lose to the Florida Marlins in a baseball
game. I'm more passionate about DSS than baseball, but an exciting
baseball game can get "my juices flowing". Thursday morning I had
breakfast with Peter Beck and Stan Kowalski, the faciliators for the
meeting. Then I checked email in the new Executive Meeting Center on
the 19th floor of the DoubleTree, the venue for our sessions. Overall,
the facilities and food were excellent.
This year the "Summit" was conducted using a "low tech" group
facilitation technique called Open Space Technology. In Open Space
meetings, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel
working sessions around a central theme. The theme for this year’s
Summit was "Rehearsing the Future" and the goal was to create a road map
for revitalizing decision support. Peter Beck, Co-Director, Strategic
Solutions Center, SAIC Strategies Group, facilitated the sessions. He
was patient and supportive as twenty-five (25) "strong personalities"
grappled with a controversial set of issues. The conference brought
together some of the most passionate advocates for computerized decision
support.
Henk Sol, Peter Keen and Alexander Verbraeck made opening comments on
the Summit theme of "Rehearsing the Future". It was obvious that they
had a vision of decision support next generation that they wanted the
group to adopt and support. Keen and Sol's upcoming book tentatively
titled "Rehearsing the Future" should clarify their ideas for a wider
audience. From my perspective, Keen and Sol advocated focusing future
decision support research on complex planning problems, especially in
the public sector, where visual simulation could help political decision
makers. They see that as the way to "revitalize decision support".
Verbraeck's (Delft University) research on visual simulation and
real-time control using distributed simulation and control components
linked using CORBA by wireless networks is very interesting and leading
edge. He has been working to develop object oriented simulation
component libraries. Verbraeck has focused on improving decisions
related to complex transportation and logistics system design problems.
Following Verbraeck's presentation, Open Space "the mini-version" took
center stage. The process, designed by Harrison Owen, often involves
groups of 400-500 people. We only had about 25 participants so it was
the "mini version". The Open Space presumption is that participants are
collectively "in charge of the meeting". Peter Beck and Stan Kowalski,
the facilitators from SAIC, gave us brainstorming freedom. We broke up
into small discussion groups based on topics volunteered on the "Market
Place" wall. David Paradice (Florida State) volunteered and then led a
discussion on "Incorporating Multiple Perspectives into DSS Models";
Rustam Vahidov (Concordia University, Montreal) presented his ideas in a
small group setting on "Situated Decision Support"; Miguel Encarnação
(iMedia) led a group on "Decision-centered Visualization and
Interfaces"; we also had a group on decision maker and stakeholder
understanding.
I spent most of Thursday in a small group with Michael Goul (ASU) and
Rustam Vahidov. Rustam is passionate about what he has labeled "situated
DSS" as the new generation of decision support systems. He is
particularly interested in the role agent-based sensors and effectors
can play in integrating decision makers, a DSS and the relevant decision
environment. Vahidov and Kersten have a paper in press at Decision
Support Systems Journal on their proposed architecture. Rustam, Michael
Goul and I discussed types of sensors and effectors. How would it work?
As an example, a sensor agent would collect price information from
supplier databases accessible from the Internet and then feed data to a
DSS that would help a decision maker choose a vendor and determine
product quantity, and then an effector agent would conduct a "bidding"
interaction to establish a final price and place an order. Rustam and
Kersten need to further clarify their ideas and terms, but this research
stream has potential for decision support in some situations. Thanks
Rustam for an interesting discussion. At the "Report Back" session,
Rustam summarized approximately 4 hours of discussion by our group in 10
minutes. The reports from the four groups were diverse. We needed more
time to question the groups about the reports.
Goul, Sol, Jim Courtney and Wafa Elgarah (both of Central Florida), and
I had a brief meeting following the group reports to review the proposed
AIS SIG DSS by-laws. After some minor changes, we agreed the by-laws
were ready for submission for approval by AIS Council. Thursday night I
watched the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the American League
Championship. Friday morning I got up early and had breakfast with Peter
Beck and Jerry Wagner.
The Friday morning session started with some controversy about the Open
Space approach and the "theme" of the Summit. People agreed to disagree
and we moved on to create some new working groups. I attended a
breakout session led by David King, formerly CTO of Comshare and now CTO
with Geac Computer Corp. (http://www.geac.com/). Geac acquired Comshare
on August 1, 2003. David was leading a small group of us who were
interested in discussing the role and mission of IAADS. Jerry Wagner was
of course a central figure in that discussion.
I also briefly attended Ramana Rao's group breakout session on creating
a Decision Support Next Generation demonstration website. Rao is the
founder and CEO of Inzight Software. He spent much of his career at
Xerox PARC. Keen and Sol joined the "demo site" group at about the same
time I did and Peter suggested identifying a "classic" problem like
supply chain for the web site. Rao and Encarnação were providing the
thought leadership and had many good ideas. We adjourned about noon; I
had a quick lunch and drove back to Cedar Falls.
The afternoon session involved reports from the groups, comments by
Peter Keen and planning for a 2004 summit. I regret that I couldn't stay
to listen, but I hope I contributed a bit to IAADS. What were the
results? We do not all agree about the scope of next generation decision
support, but clearly we all think decision support is important. DSS is
"revitalized". IMHO DSS is not about technology, software or
visualization. Rather DSS is about helping decision makers who want and
need computerized decision support to improve the quality, efficiency or
effectiveness of their decisions.
IAADS is about ideas, dialectic, dialog and building relationships for
interesting "real world" DSS projects. Thanks Jerry and all of my IAADS
friends for an interesting learning experience.
References
International Academy for Advanced Decision Support (IAADS),
http://www.iaads.unomaha.edu/
Vahidov, R. and G. E. Kersten, "Decision station: situating decision
support systems," Decision Support Systems, in press.
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What's New at DSSResources.COM?
10/24/2003 Posted case by ePeople staff, "Customer-focused decision
support at OpSource", 2003. Check the case studies page.
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DSS News Releases - October 13 to October 23, 2003
Read them at DSSResources.COM and search the DSS News Archive
10/23/2003 RSA Security extends web access management software to
support IBM(R) Lotus Notes(R) messaging and collaboration platform.
10/22/2003 Oracle journeys to the center of the grid.
10/22/2003 Ascential Software helps MicroStrategy to channel critical
business information.
10/22/2003 Call for papers IJIEM: "Business Intelligence for Competitive
Advantages"; submission deadline 12/1/2003.
10/21/2003 Cognos Enterprise Planning series continues to gain momentum
globally with customers and partners.
10/21/2003 Inter-Tel introduces enterprise conferencing and enterprise
instant messaging solutions.
10/21/2003 Visual Analytics delivers ground-breaking information sharing
and collaboration for law enforcement and homeland defense with Digital
Information Gateway (DIG(TM)).
10/20/2003 General Dynamics to provide geographic information services
to U.S. Forestry Service.
10/20/2003 Oracle(R) Database 10g on Fujitsu(R) PRIMEPOWER(TM) 2500
server sets world record for very large data warehousing performance.
10/20/2003 Patterson Dental expands deployment of MicroStrategy platform
for sales analysis and reporting.
10/17/2003 California Software releases BABY/OLAP version 2.0.
10/16/2003 Financial services leaders bank on Hyperion to manage
business performance.
10/16/2003 Teradata maintains fourth year of unbroken lead in analyst
firm data warehousing evaluation.
10/16/2003 Algo Suite 4.4 to set new standards for enterprise risk
management through Basel II compliance and distributed computing.
10/15/2003 Pharmaceutical Care Network launches next generation pharmacy
claims and utilization trends analysis and reporting tool.
10/14/2003 Intergraph addresses demand for heightened availability of
geospatial information with interoperable geospatial intelligence
solutions.
10/14/2003 Haestad Methods revolutionizes the CAD and GIS industries.
10/14/2003 Ann Taylor to use ProfitLogic's markdown optimization
solution to manage pricing of merchandise.
10/14/2003 Next-Generation Pervasive security model to define data
management in mission-critical applications.
10/14/2003 Ameritas selects Information Builders as tts business
intelligence standard.
10/13/2003 Call for Papers: International Workshop on Information
Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM2004).
10/13/2003 Plumtree launches applications program and radical openness
product strategy at Odyssey 2003.
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DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2003 by D. J. Power. Please send your questions to
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