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                          DSS News
                       by D. J. Power
                December 3, 2000 -- No. 16
         A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
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  Check the DSS Glossary page at http://dssresources.com
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Featured:
* DSS Wisdom
* Ask Dan! -- Are there any evaluations of various generic DSS 
        packages?
* What's New at DSSResources.COM
* DSS News Stories
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We have more than 2300 unique visitors each week at DSSResources.COM 
and more than 375 subscribers to this newsletter. Please forward this 
email to people interested in Decision Support Systems. 
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DSS Wisdom
"Obviously the problem in information management is not one of
gathering, organizing, storing, or retrieving data but rather one
of determining the necessary information requirements for 
decision making (p. 194)"
from Schoderbek, P. P., A. G. Kefalas, and C. G. Schoderbek, 
Management Systems: Conceptual Considerations. Dallas, TX: Business 
Publications, Inc., 1975. 
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Ask Dan!
Are there any evaluations of various generic DSS packages?
Posted By Jack Benson on November 28, 2000 at 12:30:
>Does anyone have a document that evaluates various generic DSS 
>packages in comparison format?
Hi Jack--
You are asking a question of on-going interest to practitioners that
shows why we need to differentiate different types of decision
support software. A list of all generic DSS packages is too long and
too diverse for meaningful evaluation.  We need to specify the
purpose of the DSS we want to build and then identify what generic
packages could be used to accomplish that purpose.  We also need
to identify what selection criteria are important in our specific
situation.
You should check some other Ask Dan! questions, including:
What are the leading OLAP tools on the market? 
What are the top ten DSS products by revenue?
If you are involved in a DSS project, you may find my paper
"Tips for Choosing Enterprise-wide DSS Software" useful.  It is
available in the Articles On-Line topic at DSSResources.COM.
For a general paper related to Model-Driven DSS, you can
check a paper by Bhargava, H. K., C. L. Herrick, and S. Sridhar 
titled "Beyond Spreadsheets: Software for Building Decision Support 
Systems". Computer, March 1999, pp. 31-39 in PDF at 
www.heinz.cmu.edu/~bhargava/Pub/Papers/DSS/dss-gen-computer.pdf
P. S. Please send me your comments about this Ask Dan! or post them 
to the DSSResources.COM Bulletin Board.
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What's New! at DSSResources.COM
12/03/2000 Updated University Links page.
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DSS News Stories - Nov. 20 to Dec. 3, 2000
12/01/2000 Raydium selected SPSS Analytical Solutions to understand Web 
user behavior; Raydium applies advanced Data Mining and trys to protect 
privacy.
11/30/2000 Sedgwick Claims Management Services selected Brio 
Technology's Brio ONE for customer data access and report development. 
11/30/2000 Nielsen Norman Group released a study on Wireless Access 
Protocol (WAP) usability. Findings were negative.
11/29/2000 Vite Corporation announced SimVision(TM) 3.1, software that 
helps senior executives evaluate large-scale projects.
11/29/2000 Siebel Systems announced the availability of its next 
generation of marketing automation and analytic applications.
11/28/2000 Best Buy to use Net Perceptions' in-depth reporting and 
analysis to help drive merchandising decisions.
11/28/2000 SAP AG announced significant enhancements to the mySAP 
Business Intelligence e-business solution through a broad range of 
analytical applications.
11/27/2000 MIS onVision certified for mySAP business intelligence; front 
end seamlessly integrates into SAP systems. 
11/24/2000 According to AccountancyAge.com, Comshare will resell 
Informix's 'Ardent DataStage' product.
11/22/2000 AlphaBlox Corporation announced a CyberSummit Xpert Series. 
Web-based seminars explore challenges of using and managing information 
to optimize business performance.
11/21/2000 ExecWare received patent for contextual data modeling 
interactive technique.
11/20/2000 New strategic market research from Frost & Sullivan 
(www.frost.com) reveals that biometric authentication will become much 
more prolific in the coming decade.
Note:  The full press releases are available at 
DSSResources.COM.
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http://dssresources.com/newsletters/ .
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