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DSS News
D. J. Power, Editor
May 7, 2006 -- Vol. 7, No. 10
A Free Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
approximately 1,600 Subscribers
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"Decision Support for Global Enterprises"
Check ICDSS2007.org
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Featured:
* Report from MWAIS 2006 by Dan Power
* AIS SIG DSS update by Ramesh Sharda
* DSS Conferences
* DSS News Releases
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Check the article by Andreea Vasiliu on
"Dashboards and Scorecards" at DSSResources.COM
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Report from MWAIS 2006
by Dan Power
Editor, DSSResources.COM
The spring semester has ended and I attended my first academic
conference of 2006. On Thursday, May 4 I drove 8 hours from Cedar
Falls, IA to Grand Rapids, MI for the inaugural meeting of the
Midwest United States chapter of the Association for Information
Systems (http://www.sba.uwm.edu/MWAIS). The conference was held at
Grand Valley State University and it was co-hosted by the Seidman
College of Business and the Padnos College of Engineering and
Computing. The conference was held in the DeVos Center in downtown
Grand Rapids, home of the Seidman College of Business.
Thursday evening I arrived about 7:15pm at the Courtyard by Marriott
in downtown Grand Rapids. By coincidence Prof. Ilze Zigurs, Univ. of
Nebraska at Omaha, was parking her rental car while I was parking.
Ilze has been a major contributor to founding MWAIS and she serves as
a director for the group.
I got settled in my room and then had a quiet dinner at San Chez, a
tapas bistro, located close to my hotel. I have been organizing and
promoting MWAIS and serving as Interim President. The executive board
had its first face-to-face meeting Friday morning starting at 11am. We
had been meeting for about 6 months using first audio conferencing and
then video conferencing. Necessity forced us to use those technologies
to create a participative decision making setting, but it was great to
have our first face-to-face meeting. Other officers of the group
include: Secretary Vance Wilson, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee;
Treasurer Chelley Vician, Michigan Technological University; At-Large
Director Ilze Zigurs; and Membership and Publicity Director Matt
Germonprez, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
The conference was called to order at 1pm by Conference co-chairs
Paul Leidig and Simha Magal of Grand Valley State. The keynote
speaker was Prof. Gordon B. Davis, University of Minnesota. Gordon
gave an excellent presentation titled "Securing the Future of
Information Systems as an Academic Discipline." The talk was
based on a paper he coauthored with Anne Massey, Indiana University,
and Niels Bjoern-Andersen, Copenhagen Business School, with the same
title and published in the proceedings of the 2005 International
Conference on Information Systems. The highlights: "the need for and
the value of the Information Systems function and systems continue to
be high", the "fate of the academic field of Information Systems is
associated with the continued important role of the IS function", and
"be aggressive in adding value to Information Systems practice."
Gordon suggested that Information Systems faculty have four
comparative advantages that we need to build upon. First, we are
positioned to meet staffing needs for the IS organizational function;
second, we have the expertise to help build and understand
technology-enabled organization systems; third, we understand and can
teach system concepts and systems thinking; finally, we study and
teach behavior and process modeling which is increasingly important.
A video of his presentation should be available soon at the
conference web site.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in two sessions on SAP ERP. Grand
Valley is a SAP University Alliance partner and the session focused
on using SAP ERP in the Information Systems curriculum and a hands-on
demonstration titled "Getting around in SAP". Helen Klein, David
Cannon and Simha Magal did an excellent job in sharing how they use
SAP in the business curriculum. What is the meaning of the SAP
acronym? According to Jon Reed, SAP Tips, "The original meaning
(which is German) is: 'Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der
Datenverarbeitung'. When SAP came to America, it changed to Systems,
Applications and Products." Today SAP is just SAP
(http://www.sap.com). ERP is also a slippery acronym meaning
enterprise resource planning system.
Friday evening we had a great social event at the Gerald R. Ford
Presidential Library and Museum (http://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov).
In addition to great food and conversation, the museum told the story
of the 1972 break-in at the Watergate and its aftermath culminating
with Ford's succession as the 38th President of the United States.
Both the White House Oval Office and the Cabinet Room are recreated
at the museum.
Saturday morning started with a 7am planning meeting for the 2007
MWAIS meeting that will be held May 18-19, 2007 in Springfield, IL.
Rassule Hadidi, Professor of Management Information Systems, College
of Business, University of Illinois at Springfield, is leading the
conference planning. By 8am I was attending a session. I can't
discuss all of the outstanding papers, but I do want to mention an
excellent presentation by David Kroenke, University of Washington,
on "The Crisis in the Introductory MIS Class". Kroenke
was both interesting and provocative. He did mention BI and decision
support briefly. Kroenke explains RFM analysis as a BI tool in
his introductory MIS class. You might ask what is RFM analysis? RFM
(recency, frequency, monetary) analysis is a technique often used in
marketing research to determine one's best customers. The analysis
uses purchasing data and examines how recently a customer has
purchased (recency), how often they purchase (frequency), and how
much they spend (monetary). RFM analysis is anchored in the marketing
axiom that "80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers." So
build a data-driven DSS to help sales staff target the "best 20%" of
your customers!
Following lunch I chaired the MWAIS business meeting. Dean James
Williams, Seidman College, and Paul Plotkowski, Padnos College,
welcomed the attendees, we discussed member services, had elections,
and had a preview of MWAIS 2007. The interim officers were elected
unanimously and Prof. Deepak Khazanchi, Chair of the Department of
Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis in the College of
Information Science and Technology at the University of Nebraska at
Omaha, was endorsed as President-elect of MWAIS. His term as
President begins May 19, 2007 at the next annual conference. Deepak
is seeking proposals to host the MWAIS 2008 conference.
My paper with Chelley Vician was in the last session of the day. We
reported on our observations of virtual decision-making meetings. I
left Grand Rapids at about 6pm and got back to Cedar Falls about 8
1/2 hours later. Traffic delays in Chicago added almost an hour to my
journey. Well thanks for reading this far. My next trip is to London
for CIDMDS 2006, the International Conference on Creativity and
Innovation in Decision Making and Decision Support sponsored by IFIP
WG 8.3, June 28 - July 1, 2006. Check http://www.ifip-dss.org/ .
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AIS SIG DSS update
by Ramesh Sharda
Chair AIS SIG DSS
SIG DSS of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) is
organizing the Ninth International Conference on Decision Support
Systems (ICDSS 2007) in India on Jan. 2-4, 2007. The purpose of ICDSS
2007 is to promote discussion and interaction among members of the
information systems community with research interests in cutting edge
decision support systems. The emphasis is on emerging enterprise
decision making processes, increasing needs to make decisions and
reason under uncertainty, new infrastructure for decision making in
organizations and society, the role of web technologies, and emerging
theories and practices for knowledge management. Clearly, global
decision support issues are of special interest.
The Conference will be held at Indian Institute of
Management-Calcutta campus, with housing available on campus or at
nearby hotels. Details of the meeting are available at the conference
website http://icdss2007.org/. Prof. Amitava Bagchi and I are
co-general chairs.
A high profile program committee is in place, with Dan Power and
Uday Kulkarni as co-Program Chairs. A tour program is under
development to allow side tours of the Taj Mahal (Agra) and other
major sites in conjunction with this conference.
The meeting will result in a high quality refereed book volume in
Springer's IS2 series, and also a web/CD based proceedings of other
papers to be presented at the meeting. Papers for review for
inclusion in the book are due by May 10, 2006 (let us know if you
will need extra time to complete your submission). Abstracts and
papers for presentation and inclusion in the web proceedings will be
accepted on a rolling basis until Sept. 18, 2006.
Also, would you do me a favor? Please use the link below to give us
an idea of your plans to attend the meeting. It is not a formal
commitment, just a tentative idea of your intentions, especially if
you do plan to attend. Your privacy is protected in that we will not
share this information with anyone else.
URL: http://iris.okstate.edu/icdss2007/survey.htm
Ramesh Sharda
ramesh.sharda@okstate.edu
ConocoPhillips Chair and Regents Prof. of Mgmt. Sc. and Info. Systems
Oklahoma State University, Spears School of Bus.
Director, Institute for Research in Information Systems (IRIS)
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Purchase Dan Power's DSS FAQ book
83 frequently asked questions about computerized DSS
http://dssresources.com/dssbookstore/power2005.html
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DSS Conferences
1. ISCRAM2006, the Third International Conference on Information
Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Newark, New Jersey, USA,
at the New Jersey Institute of Technology from May 14-17, 2006.
Check http://www.iscram.org .
2. CIDMDS 2006, International Conference on Creativity and
Innovation in Decision Making and Decision Support
sponsored by IFIP WG 8.3, June 28th - July 1st 2006, London,
UK. Check http://www.ifip-dss.org/ .
3. DEXA 2006, 17th International Conference on Database
and Expert Systems Applications, September 4-8,
2006, Krakow, Poland. Check http://www.dexa.org .
4. ICDSS 2007, 9th International Conference on DSS, Jan. 2-4, 2007,
Calcutta, India. Theme: Decision Support for Global Enterprises.
Check http://www.ICDSS2007.org . Papers due May 10, 2006.
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What's New at DSSResources.COM
04/30/2006 Posted an article by Andreea Vasiliu "Dashboards
and Scorecards: Linking Management Reporting to Execution".
Check the articles page.
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DSS News Releases - April 23, 2006 to May 5, 2006
Read them at DSSResources.COM and search the DSS News Archive
05/04/2006 Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables
Hunton & Williams to improve information management.
05/03/2006 Applix named to Intelligent Enterprise's 'Companies to
Watch' list for second year in a row.
05/03/2006 Business boot camp: CIOs place increased weight on
business acumen when evaluating job candidates.
05/03/2006 Call for short articles: Encyclopedia of Decision Making
and Decision Support Technologies.
05/02/2006 SAP introduces Human Capital Management application for
U.S. Federal civilian agencies.
05/01/2006 CALL FOR PAPERS: VLDB 06 Workshop on Business
Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise.
04/27/2006 Seagate 750GB: a must-have desk accessory for digital
content.
04/27/2006 Worldwide handheld device market starts 2006 with
continued decline in shipments, according to IDC.
04/26/2006 Microsoft Research recognizes computer science's most
promising professors with new faculty fellowships.
04/26/2006 Oracle unveils Oracle(R) Database Vault to safeguard
sensitive information.
04/25/2006 Information Builders introduces process-driven business
intelligence.
04/24/2006 Informatica previews agenda for Informatica World 2006.
04/24/2006 New open source business intelligence server available
from JasperSoft.
04/24/2006 Cognos introduces new financial services performance
solution to help retail banks optimize branch profitability.
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DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2006 by D. J. Power. Please send your
questions to daniel.power@dssresources.com
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