************************************************************ DSS News D. J. Power, Editor April 28, 2002 -- Vol. 3, No. 9 A Bi-Weekly Publication of DSSResources.COM ************************************************************ Check the Case from Proclarity about Decision Support at Emerald Health at DSSResources.COM ************************************************************ Featured: * DSS Wisdom * Ask Dan! - What are the "best" Decision Support Systems academic programs? * What's New at DSSResources.COM * DSS News Stories ************************************************************ Check Dan Power's new book, Decision Support Systems: Concepts and Resources for Managers. Get more information at http://www.dssresources.com/dssbookstore/power02.html . ************************************************************ This newsletter has more than 800 subscribers from 50 countries. Please forward this newsletter to people interested in Decision Support Systems or suggest they visit DSSResources.COM. ************************************************************ DSS Wisdom According to Alexis and Wilson (1967), "One of the fundamental information problems of large organizations is this: Information is costly, hence organizations must balance the gain from information against the cost of obaining it. Organizations thus seek to develop systems that generate information with many end uses (multi-purpose information systems). But many decision situations require specialized information, useful for that situation alone. This is costly to provide. To improve the quality of information where high information collection costs cannot be justified, managers must find ways to reduce collection costs." (p. 337) from Alexis, M. and C. Wilson. Organizational Decision Making. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967. ************************************************************ Ask Dan! by D. J. Power What are the "best" Decision Support Systems academic programs? I'm somewhat reluctant to even attempt to answer this question, but it or something similar is a question I receive frequently. Some of the related questions include: Where should I go to study DSS? What are the top Ph.D. programs in DSS? Where is the best DSS research being conducted? What are the "best" DSS research groups in academia or companies? So with a certain trepidation, I'll try to frame my answer from a number of perspectives and I'm open to additions and suggestions to add to this response. My analysis focused on clusters of DSS researchers at universities, programs of study and external rankings. First, let's look at "best" in terms of programs with clusters of faculty who have published DSS research. Where are the concentrations of faculty who have done research on Decision Support related topics? This answer shifts to some extent each year as faculty change jobs, retire or move to industry. Many of the early DSS researchers left academic jobs and went into industry. That outflow of talent hurt the development of academic programs in DSS, but some of those people have crossed back to university research and teaching. The DSSResources.COM DSS Researchers Web Page Directory is a good starting place for identifying active researchers in DSS. Some faculty groups to check include Arizona State University (Mike Goul, Andy Philippakis, Robert St Louis, Karen Dowling), the University of Arizona (Jay Nunamaker, David Pingry, Hsinchun Chen), the University of Georgia (Jay Aronson, Bob Bostrom, Hugh Watson), the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Ralph Sprague, Tung Bui, Ray Panko, Bill Remus) and Virginia Tech (Larry Moore, Cliff Ragsdale, Terry Rakes, Loren Rees). All five of these universities have strong DSS faculty groups. The Naval Post Graduate School has had outstanding faculty, especially related to model-driven DSS. And until recently, Texas A&M was strong in DSS, but many faculty have moved on to other programs. From a more global perspective check programs at Monash University in Australia, City University of Hong Kong and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. You can find some additional groups on the DSS Research Centers page. It's my opinion, that the key for a strong masters or doctoral program is a cluster of active researchers in a specific research area like DSS. Kevin Crowston at Syracuse maintains a list of 139 PhD degree programs in information-related fields (visit http://isphd.syr.edu). The short program descriptions can help in identifying strong programs. Second, let's briefly look at the content of undergraduate and graduate degree programs. As far as structured programs of study, I visited a number of websites and I was especially impressed with the Decision Support Systems undergraduate program at Virginia Tech in the Pamplin College of Business in the Business Information Technology department. Virginia Tech has reinvented its Management Science and Information Technology program in a positive, proactive way. The Virginia Tech Business Information Technology website reports "In the January 9, 1995 issue of Computerworld magazine, in an article surveying 25 of the largest firms that annually hire new graduates in the information systems field, our DSS option major was ranked among the top ten schools in the country for IS graduates. Other universities listed in the top ten included Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, Pennsylvania and Virginia." Given the faculty and the program of study that assessment should still be true today. In general, specializing in Decision Support Systems is a better focus for MS and Ph.D. programs. Any undergraduate program that stresses decision support must insure that students study the fundamentals in systems analysis, database design and development and management science. The Virginia Tech program does. Finally, let's link the above information to ratings of MIS programs and see if any conclusions are appropriate. Now we get to external ratings and rankings. Allen Lee (2001) wrote an editorial in MIS Quarterly titled "What Are the Best MIS Programs in U.S. Business Schools?" He examined the ratings from Business Week and U.S. News & World Report and compared them to information from 3 experts. Allen also visited web sites. I examined Allen's analysis and tried to critique what he found in the context of DSS. For example, Massachusetts Institute of Technology still ranks highly in the external ratings, but it is not the center of DSS research it was in the 1970s. The University of Texas at Austin (Andrew Whinston, George Huber) has an outstanding MIS program, but its faculty seem to have shifted their research emphasis. All of the universities mentioned above are generally ranked highly in the external sources, but as Allen Lee noted "There are some surprises." You can check the U.S. News & World Report Best Undergraduate Business Specialties at http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/business/mis.htm. The strong programs will publicize what they do well. For example, check the University of Georgia, Terry College of Business 2001-2002 Rankings Summary at http://www.terry.uga.edu/news/rankings/2002. "The MIS faculty ranked first in research productivity, based on the number of research articles published from 1993-1997 in the field's two leading academic journals, MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research." Visiting web sites is a good way to find out more about academic programs and faculty. Students interested in applying to a graduate or undergraduate program should check web sites. Assessing where to study for a Ph.D. is always a challenge. Strong candidates should try to read some articles in academic journals like Decision Support Systems and find authors who seem to be doing interesting work; then track them down and see if their university has a strong graduate program. Finally, try to contact the professor to make sure s/he is involved in graduate teaching. If you are working in industry, and want to retool and/or change careers attend an academic professional meeting like the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in the summer prior to when you want to enter graduate school. AMCIS 2002 (URL http://hsb.baylor.edu/AMCIS2002/) is a good place to find out about Decision Support academic programs, researchers and job opportunities. DISCLAIMER: One should view any ranking of academic programs with skepticism. In most cases programs are difficult to compare and the criteria are hard to measure. Criteria are either subjective or narrow measuable surrogates for broad subjective measures like quality and if raters are involved, they are often unavoidably biased. Prospective students and potential employees should using ratings as a starting point in a search process or as one of many inputs in a decision process. ---------------- References Lee, A. S. "What Are the Best MIS Programs in U.S. Business Schools? MIS Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3, pp. iii-vii, September 2001. http://www.misq.org/archivist/vol/no25/issue3/edstat.pdf U.S. News & World Report Best Undergraduate Business Specialties http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/business/mis.htm ************************************************************ What's New at DSSResources.COM 04/21/2002 Revised For Managers page and Library page. 04/14/2002 Posted article by ProClarity Staff, "ProClarity Helps Major Preferred Provider Organization Enhance its Value in Many Ways", ProClarity Corp., 2002, URL DSSResources.COM/cases/emerald_health.htm. ************************************************************ DSS News - April 12 to 26, 2002 04/26/2002 Mellon HR Solutions will provide global online Human Resources Management Services to American Express. 04/25/2002 10 Gigabit Ethernet Alliance prepares to introduce 10 GbE interoperability network. 04/24/2002 Intergraph Mapping and GIS Solutions initiates homeland security network. 04/23/2002 Cal State University Office of the Chancellor adopts ServiceWare knowledge management solutions. 04/23/2002 Siebel eInsurance 7 provides CRM functionality for management of insurance channels. 04/23/2002 Neiman Marcus selects Business Objects for Strategic Business Intelligence CRM application. 04/22/2002 Teradata Introduces Teradata Warehouse 6.2 Suite. 04/22/2002 MicroStrategy announced Microstrategy 7i Business Intelligence platform. 04/22/2002 ProClarity Corporation announces Release 5, analytic solution to deliver shared business logic to the decision maker. 04/22/2002 Aberdeen user survey finds Financial Analytics face adoption challenges. 04/19/2002 UtiliCorp Networks Canada chooses Intergraph's GeoMedia Technology for managing mission-critical utility data. 04/17/2002 Intergraph Mapping and GIS Solutions and the city of Abbotsford partner for Internet-based city services. 04/17/2002 CIOs Agree on Key Issues; Attenza CIO Roundtable Illuminates Common Themes. 04/17/2002 Intergraph's Team GeoMedia Programs surpass 100 members and expand global reach. 04/16/2002 AmeriCredit improves information reporting with Cognos Business Intelligence. 04/16/2002 Databeacon announced release of Databeacon 5.3 with new features for interactive data publishing. 04/15/2002 Decision Management International introduced Regulus™ 3.0. 04/15/2002 HNC Software announced Decision Manager for Claims, first decisioning tool specifically for workers' compensation. 04/15/2002 Decisioneering forms partnership with DATASKILL to develop Stochastic Modeling Workbench. 04/12/2002 Northrop Grumman to provide computer-aided dispatch, mapping system to California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. ************************************************************ This newsletter is available online in the Subscriber Zone at http://dssresources.com/newsletters/ . ************************************************************ DSS News is copyrighted (c) 2002 by D. J. Power. Please send your questions to daniel.power@dssresources.com. You have previously subscribed to the DSS News Mailing List. |