Session 15

Decision Support Systems 150:127 -- D. Power

Today's Agenda -- Tuesday, February 27, 2007

• Case discussion eRoom "Naval Medicine" and Wasyluk "Veteran's Affairs"
• Discuss "Implementing Communications-driven and Group DSS"
• What are the features of a communications-driven DSS?

1) Agenda creation. Decision meetings are more productive with an
agenda of issues and tasks. Ideally a communications-driven DSS will
facilitate creating and following an agenda.

2) Annotation, participants can highlight or mark items on the
shared display. In a decision meeting all participants should feel
that they can contribute to the group decisions and outputs.

3) Application and document sharing. During a meeting participants
should be able to easily share analyses, documents, etc.

4) Bulletin boards or forums. Exchanging ideas by posting messages
to a web-based bulleting board or forum can be a useful asynchronous
decision support tool. 

5) Chat or text interaction, real-time text-only conversation between
two or more people online. In a decision meeting chat can create a
secondary communication channel. In some situations however this
feature can actually hinder decision making.

6) Meeting scheduling and management. A communications-driven DSS
should help team leaders easily and quickly organize meetings. Also,
the system should automatically send invitations and confirm
participation of those invited.

7) Polls. During a meeting, it can be useful for the team leader to
conduct a vote on a topic or gather opinions.

8) Record meetings. Communications-driven DSS should have some
capability to record inputs and ideally a team leader should be able
to record the entire meeting for replay and review. Ideally there
should be a feature so that a meeting space can "persist" from one
session to another. In some situations participants should be able to
return to a virtual meeting supported by a communications-driven DSS
and find their notes, files and applications as they left them at the
end of the prior session.

9) Slide presentations. It is common in decision meetings for
participants to make presentations and this should be possible in
virtual meetings facilitated with technology.

10) Video interaction. Seeing participants during a virtual meeting
expands the social interaction and can facilitate team building and
acceptance of a shared decision. During video interaction, users
should be able to see all participants and each user should be able
to choose who to "look at" during the interaction.

11) Voice interaction. When bandwidth or cost limits the
possibilities for video and voice interaction, a synchronous meeting
will be more productive with voice rather than text interaction.
Synchronous decision meeting software should facilitate interaction.

12) Web joint browsing. The world wide web is a rich information
source that should be available during virtual decision making
meetings. 

13) Whiteboard, an area on a display screen that multiple users can
write or draw upon. In physical meetings, a blackboard or whiteboard
is a powerful general tool for sharing information. In virtual
meetings, this same capability should be a feature of a
communications-driven DSS.

from DSS News, Vol. 8, No. 2, January 28, 2007 

To Do and Upcoming

• For Class Session 16 -- Thursday, March 1
• Tutorial 2 "List Management and Pivot Tables". On p. 87 Figure 2-25 after step 3 print rows 1-7, page 103 step 6 print, page 108 print AgeAnalysis step 5 (values will differ from Fig. 2-45), page 113 step 3 print drill down results (values will differ from Fig. 2-49). (5 points)
• For Class Session 17 -- Tuesday, March 6
• Read Ch. 8. Building Data and Document-driven DSS