DSS News is a free biweekly newsletter from DSSResources.COM about computerized Decision Support Systems. *********************************************************** DSS News D. J. Power, Editor June 19, 2005 -- Vol. 6, No. 14 A Free Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM 1,175 Subscribers ************************************************************ Check the case by Dan Power and Carol Fletcher "University of Northern Iowa Dining Services uses FoodPro" ************************************************************ Featured: * Ask Dan! - Report from AAUP Annual Meeting Washington, D.C. * DSS Conferences * DSS News Releases ************************************************************ Ask Dan! Report from AAUP Annual Meeting Washington, D.C. by Dan Power From June 9-11, 2005, I was a delegate to the Ninety-first Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in Washington, D.C. representing the University of Northern Iowa AAUP Chapter. Such a large representative gathering reminded me of all of the pluses and minuses of traditional structured, large group decision processes. In this trip report I'll summarize the meeting, but I also want to focus on computerized decision support for such meetings and processes. My first activities were Collective Bargaining Congress functions on Thursday evening. Following an orientation for new delegates, we had dinner and then a business session. AAUP has 70 Collective Bargaining Chapters including very large Chapters from California and New York. At the business session physical cards were given out to delegates so they could vote on Friday morning from 7:30am-8:30am for Officers and Council. Given that all Chapters were not in attendance, it probably would have been better to have had web-based voting following the meeting. On Friday morning I took the subway into the Washington Court Hotel from New Carrollton where I was staying. The subway ride took longer than expected due to a mechanical problem and I didn't arrive until after 8:30am. I attended a TIAA-CREF Estate Planning Seminar and then a prescreening of the PBS documentary "Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk". John Merrow, the correspondent, was at the session and responded to our questions and concerns. I recommend that people watch it when it is released June 23. We only saw a preliminary cut of the first hour of the 2 hour documentary. Merrow tried to present a balanced answer to the question "How good is higher education in America?" Sadly the response primarily dredges up all of the good and bad stereotypes of Higher Education. The first hour presents little that is new. The main problem we have is trying to educate too many students, some of whom are poorly prepared and only weakly motivated, in an underfunded, understaffed Higher Education System primarily created for selective admissions rather than broad-based public education. Clearly Higher Education must change, but how and with what resources remains unanswered in the documentary. The official website is http://www.decliningbydegrees.org . Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, gave an outstanding Plenary Luncheon address. Friday afternoon was focused on workshops. The Annual Meeting actually started Saturday morning following an open dialog with Roger Bowen, the General Secretary of AAUP. Dr. Bowen assumed his duties in November 2003. He served as president of the State University of New York at New Paltz from 1996-2001. Roger brings real commitment to the job and is a strong advocate for Faculty. The morning session involved recommendations to the delegates from the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure (Committee A). These recommendations dealt with removing and imposing censure on Colleges and Universities that violate Faculty Rights. An elaborate investigative process and committee review occurs before resolutions are brought to the Annual Meeting. There was no evidence of computerized decision support in the process, but there was much evidence of careful scrutiny, systematic data collection and serious deliberation. My guess is that email communications and word processing facilitated the process, but that was about all that was used and yet it was probably adequate given the number of complaints. If Committee A was evaluating 25-30 complaints each year, then a document-driven DSS with some web-based voting might be helpful. Delegates voted to place Virginia State University, the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, and Meharry Medical College in Tennessee on its list of censured administrations. We then voted to remove Wingate University in North Carolina and Southern Nazarene University in Oklahoma from the censure list. The delegates also endorsed a supplementary report on Benedict College in South Carolina, which is already on the association's censure list. I think the case of Benedict College especially deserves our attention. The Web has all of the details (check http://www.aaup.org/Com-a/Institutions/ benedictam.htm ), but briefly the college's current president, Dr. David H. Swinton, decided that all faculty would weight effort as heavily as achievement in their grading of first- and second-year students. When two faculty members refused to comply with the new policy, Swinton dismissed them. Dr. William Gunn is the President of the Benedict College AAUP Chapter and he needs our help and support. The Benedict website is www.benedict.edu and you can write to Gunn or Swinton at Benedict College, 1600 Harden Street, Columbia, SC 29204. The Benedict College administration was censured in 1994 due to deficiencies in official college policies governing faculty appointments. The censure remains in effect. Following lunch, Tariq Ramadan, a renowned scholar on the interactions of Islam with western cultures, addressed the annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors by video conference. Ramadan was not granted a US Visa to teach in the US or to attend the Annual meeting. Based on the video and a live question and answer session, I was much impressed by Ramadan. It is disappointing that he could not attend. In the afternoon we completed voting on a constitutional amendment on membership. A Call for a Proportional Vote would have wrecked havoc. AAUP has no easy means for letting delegates vote based on the number of members in chapters. Some computerized support could make proportional voting much easier. For many years the US Congress has had electronic voting because of the cumbersome nature of casting over 400 votes in an assembly. When some delegates have 50 votes and others have 300, the casting and counting nightmare really escalates. AAUP has about 44,000 members and approximately 200 delegates were at the meeting representing the membership. Also, in the afternoon we voted on Resolutions from the Committee on Resolutions. Amendments and substitute amendments bogged down the process, and providing the secretary with a portable computer to display the amendments on the front screen would have improved the decision process. Ultimately we passed three resolutions supporting the right of graduate student employees to choose representation by a collective bargaining agent, expressing our concern over increased attacks on the academic freedom of teachers and scholars across the nation, and supporting the teaching of evolution. The annual meeting adjourned at 3pm and I attended the Committee on Contingent Faculty and The Profession session until 5:30pm. Universities need to reduce the number of contingent faculty and current faculty need to fight for more tenure and tenure-track faculty positions. The instability created by contingent faculty hurts Universities and those serving in such roles. Well-educated citizens are the foundation for maintaining freedom and democracy, we can't jeopardize all that we have accomplished in the past 225 years to create more staffing flexibility, to lower the cost per credit hour or other illusory benefits of contingent faculty. So what did I learn at the meeting? Although the processes of democratic organizations can be streamlined and in specific instances improved with computerized decision support, traditional large group, democratic decision processes work. Clearly the AAUP annual meeting could have benefited from technology to display resolutions and allow for editing them. Also, more web-based delegate or member voting prior to the annual meeting may actually increase member involvement. AAUP's purpose is "to advance academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education's contribution to the common good." Decision support technologies can help members and staff accomplish this purpose. In the future, AAUP needs to do more with discipline-oriented professional associations to enact, evaluate and enforce codes of professional ethics and responsibilities. To support this effort, AAUP needs a data base repository of such information and AAUP should provide an ongoing evaluation of such codes. Also, the AAUP is becoming the AUP. AAUP is becoming a global Association of University Professors who share a strong commitment to Academic Freedom and Academic Responsibility. Computerized decision support can help maintain a democratic, participative organization as it "goes global". The web site address is http://www.aaup.org. Sunday, I journeyed back to Cedar Falls. ************************************************************ Purchase Dan Power's DSS FAQ book 83 frequently asked questions about computerized DSS http://dssresources.com/dssbookstore/power2005.html ************************************************************ DSS Conferences Upcoming Conferences 1. International workshop on context modeling and decision support will be held July 5, 2005 in Paris, France. Check http://ec.cba.hawaii.edu/context/program.html . 2. PACIS 2005 will be held July 7-10, 2005, Bangkok, Thailand. Check www.pacis2005.ku.ac.th . 3. Eighth International Conference on Decision Support Systems (ISDSS'05),Trends in DSS Research and Practice, sponsored by AIS SIG DSS, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, July 12-15, 2005. Check www.ufrgs.br/dss2005 . 4. AMCIS 2005 with SIG DSS mini-tracks in Omaha, Nebraska, USA, August 11 - 14, 2005. Check amcis2005.isqa.unomaha.edu . SIGDSS meeting Thursday, August 11 from 5:30 - 7:30PM. 5. 2005 NPRA Plant Automation and Decision Support Conference, October 18-21, 2005, Gaylord Texan Hotel, Grapevine, Texas. Check npra.org . 6. Call for Papers: ACM Eighth International Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP 2005), November 4-5, 2005, Bremen, Germany. Submissions due July 19, 2005. Check http://gplsi.dlsi.ua.es/congresos/dolap05/ . ************************************************************ Please tell your DSS friends about DSSResources.COM ************************************************************ DSS News Releases - June 6 to June 19, 2005 Read them at DSSResources.COM and search the DSS News Archive 06/17/2005 Business Objects announces 11th Annual International User Conference; "Business Objects Insight" aims to help organizations perform on an entirely new scale. 06/16/2005 Dallas County, Iowa, selects Intergraph Web mapping solutions. 06/16/2005 Executive Summit at Agile 2005 highlights growing support for agile practices by senior managers. 06/16/2005 Microsoft taps OSI technology for coalition warrior interoperability demonstration. 06/15/2005 New E-mail security mechanism for HIPAA and business compliance. 06/15/2005 Poindexter Systems using SAS Enterprise BI Server to enhance online marketing campaigns; comprehensive BI platform creates 'elegant' advertising reports, simplified data summaries. 06/14/2005 GoAntiques.com features PriceMiner(TM) at eBay Live! 2005. 06/14/2005 Business Objects to deliver trusted information throughout the enterprise for Vivendi Universal Games. 06/13/2005 PlanReady(TM) announces new name, location and introduces their next generation solution - RescueConnexion(TM). 06/13/2005 ProClarity teams with Microsoft to extend comprehensive scorecard application. 06/13/2005 LoanCenter Consumer enriches Bangor Savings Bank's indirect lending; APPRO Systems, Inc. enables bank to auto-decision loan applications. 06/10/2005 ProClarity Analytics platform named Best of TechEd 2005 in Business Intelligence Solutions Category. 06/09/2005 MicroStrategy Symposium in Chicago to highlight real-world business intelligence solutions July 18-20, 2005. 06/09/2005 U.S. Mayors to glimpse new security technology; TechAlt to demonstrate new interoperability solutions for first responders. 06/08/2005 NASA funds projects to develop decision-making tools. 06/07/2005 For Your Eyes Only! American Academy of Ophthalmology explains iris scanning technology. 06/07/2005 MicroStrategy tops peer group as preferred business intelligence product to standardize on, according to independent survey. 06/07/2005 BusinessObjects XI deployed at Turner Broadcasting. 06/06/2005 Viewmark provides Frontier Airlines with usability lab to examine and improve its online ticket booking process. 06/06/2005 Apple to use Intel microprocessors beginning in 2006. 06/06/2005 Ballmer outlines opportunity for IT pros and developers to enable people to drive business success. ************************************************************ DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2005 by D. J. Power. Please send your questions to daniel.power@dssresources.com. |