************************************************************
DSS News
by D. J. Power
July 1, 2001 -- Vol. 2, No. 14
A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM
************************************************************
Check the "For Researchers" page at http://dssresources.com
************************************************************
Featured:
* DSS Wisdom
* Ask Dan! -- What is the difference between knowledge management and
decision support?
* Comments from our readers
* DSS News Stories
************************************************************
Each week, we have about 3000 unique visitors at DSSResources.COM.
Also, this newsletter has more than 575 subscribers from 50 countries.
Please forward this newsletter to people interested in Decision Support
Systems or suggest they visit DSSResources.COM.
************************************************************
DSS Wisdom
In his 1971 book, C. West Churchman discussed many topics related to
supporting decision makers. Early in that book he stated "Knowledge can
be considered as a collection of information, or as an activity, or as a
potential. If we think of it as a collection of information, then the
analogy of a computer's memory is helpful, for we can say that knowledge
about something is like the storage of meaningful and true strings of
symbols in a computer. ... Put otherwise, to conceive of knowledge as a
collection of information seems to rob the concept of all its life. ...
knowledge resides in the user and not in the collection. It is how the
user reacts to a collection of information that matters. ... Thus
knowledge is a potential for a certain type of action, by which we mean
that the action would occur if certain tests were run. For example, a
library plus its user has knowledge if a certain type of response will
be evoked under a given set of stipulations ... (p. 9-11)"
Churchman, C.W. The Design of Inquiring Systems, Basic Books, New York,
NY, 1971.
************************************************************
What is the difference between knowledge management and decision
support?
Recently, I listened to an address by Milt Jenkins, University of
Baltimore, titled "The Evolution of the MIS Discipline: From Data,
Through Information and Knowledge, To Wisdom." Milt was speaking in
Krakow at the Informing Science Conference organized by Eli Cohen,
Andrzej Zaliwski, and Alka Harriger. When Milt finished I wasn't certain
if "Wisdom Management Systems" would be the new buzzword or if I was
becoming a traditionalist and falling behind the times.
Milt's talk reinforced my conclusion that we have a problem. Many
people are expecting too much from technology and some people seem to
have forgotten that managers and decision-makers bring their values,
experiences, knowledge and hopefully wisdom to the interaction with our
decision support and information systems.
One symptom of this problem is the focus on knowledge management
systems. For the past 7 years I have tried to ignore the knowledge
management fad, but in this Ask Dan! I'll try to explain how knowledge
management and decision support differ. You may be asking ... why? Well,
recently I spoke with a doctoral student who thought knowledge
management might be replacing DSS. So I decided to check out the current
status of knowledge management.
Information Week (June 25, 2001) called knowledge management "fuzzy" in
an article on Lotus Development's Discovery software. Another article
suggested taxonomy is the current watchword in knowledge management.
Apparently, people are recognizing that how "knowledge" is organized is
perhaps more important than the "bells and whistles" of the software. To
get a more academic perspective I visited http://www.brint.com, a web
site run by Yogesh Malhotra. I had always considered that brint.com was
promoting knowledge management. After reading a few articles by
Malhotra (1997, 2000), I wasn't certain what knowledge management was or
if it was a good thing or not. Malhotra notes "Most of our knowledge
management technology concentrates on efficiency and creating a
consensus-oriented view. The data archived in technological ‘knowledge
repositories’ is rational, static and without context and such systems
do not account for renewal of existing knowledge and creation of new
knowledge." But Malhotra seems to think that knowledge management is
still somehow important.
What I think is that "knowledge management technologies" are an
important delivery component in what I am calling document-driven DSS.
This type of Decision Support System helps managers use specific
documents and "knowledge" to support specific decision tasks. A good
Document-Driven Decision Support System helps managers find relevant
text-oriented information quickly. Decision support is a much more
modest and much less grandiose concept that knowledge management. The
scope of a document-driven DSS should be limited and we should have a
framework for organizing what we are storing and collecting. A
document-driven DSS should not be a static repository rather it should
evolve and get better as it is used!
Churchman (1971) noted "Knowledge resides in the user and not in the
collection. (p. 10)" So let's build narrow domain collections of
documents and "knowledge" relevant to specific decision processes and
tasks and use them to support specific managers and knowledge workers.
What do you think about knowledge management systems (KMS) versus DSS?
Dan
References
Churchman, C.W. The Design of Inquiring Systems, Basic Books, New York,
NY, 1971.
Malhotra, Y. "Knowledge Management in Inquiring Organizations," in the
Proceedings of 3rd Americas Conference on Information Systems
(Philosophy of Information Systems Mini-track), Indianapolis, IN, August
15-17, 1997, pp. 293-295.
Malhotra, Y. "Knowledge Management for E-Business Performance: Advancing
Information Strategy to ‘Internet Time’", Information Strategy: The
Executive's Journal, vol. 16(4), Summer 2000, pp. 5-16.
Malhotra, Y. "From Information Management to Knowledge Management:
Beyond the 'Hi-Tech Hidebound' Systems". In K. Srikantaiah & M.E.D.
Koenig (Eds.), Knowledge Management for the Information Professional
Medford, N.J.: Information Today Inc., 2000, pp. 37-61.
************************************************************
Comments from our readers
Dear Professor Power:
Speaking about the spread of technological innovations I feel that it is
worth mentioning E. Mansfield's research in early 60's, especially his
paper in Econometrica (1961), showing that the technology adoption curve
is a typical S-shape curve, very similar to those describing spread of
epidemics in the classical Kermack-McKendrick model of mathematical
epidemiology (1927). These models are also presented in Martin Braun's
book "Differential Equations and Their Applications" (Springer-Verlag,
New York 1978).
Best regards,
J. A. Cibej
Ljubljana, Slovenia
************************************************************
DSS News Stories - June 14 to June 30, 2001
06/28/2001 U.S. Defense Commissary Agency realized immediate ROI with
Manhattan Associates' Warehouse Management System.
06/27/2001 Kemper Insurance implements Fair, Isaac Underwriting
solution; it provides easy, accurate, real-time Decision Support for
1,600 agents.
06/26/2001 U.S. Internal Revenue Service will extend its "balanced
measures" Comshare Decision application to a wider user-base.
06/26/2001 MIT Professor Stephen Graves joined Servigistics as Chief
Scientist.
06/26/2001 Smart Software announced the availability of SmartForecasts,
Version 5.2, at the Retail Systems 2001 Expo.
06/25/2001 Compaq transfers technology to Intel and plans to move its
64-bit servers to Intel Itanium™ processor.
06/25/2001 Sagent Data Load Server received high marks in SPEX
Research's ETL Tools 2001 review.
06/19/2001 Cray selected Servigistics for Service Parts Planning and
decision Support.
06/19/2001 Technology and consulting companies working with Business
Objects Mobile Business Intelligence Strategy.
Check release.
06/18/2001 Wells Fargo Home Mortgage selected MicroStrategy and Cytek to
implement integrated Banking Intelligence Solution.
06/14/2001 UBC Commerce teams up with Cognos® to sharpen competitive
edge for students.
************************************************************
This newsletter is available online at
http://dssresources.com/newsletters/ .
************************************************************
DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2001 by D. J. Power. Please send your email to
power@dssresources.com. You have previously subscribed to the DSS News Mailing
List. To unsubcribe, send an email to dssresources-unsubscribe@topica.com .
|