Blog: Dan Power

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Collaborative Decision Making

Hello from Toulouse. Monday, June 30, 2008, I arrived here for the IFIP TC8/WG8.3 Working Conference on Collaborative Decision Making. I am blogging fron a small Internet cafe in a self serve photocopy store. The charge is small, 1 euro per hour, but I am struggling with the French keyboard. For example, "q" is where "a" should be and in general it is good that I am basically a "hunt and peck" keyboarder and not a touch typist.

So what am I learning and doing?

On Tuesday, July 1, I attended a pre-conference workshop conducted by Patrick Humphreys and Carol Lorac (London School of Economics), I especially enjoyed Carol's discussion of using images and sounds to convey information and stimulate creativity in collaborative spaces.

Wednesday morning, Robert Winter (St. Galllen) delivered a keynote on Enterprise-wide Information Logistics to start the conference. No direct connection to collaborative decision making, but moving data around in and between organizations is something we need to better understand and perform for data-driven decision support. I had met Robert at a Teradata conference and he makes a good case for how important his topic is for managers and researchers.

My presentation of a paper coauthored with Susan Wurtz, "Designing and Delivering Training to Enable Managers to Use the SL Environment to Support Organizational Decision-Making", seemed to go well. The university, Manufacture des Tabacs, blocks peer to peer file sharing so I could not demonstrate Second Life, but I showed the Decision Support World YouTube video to help people better understand collaboration in a multiuser virtual world.

Following lunch, I attended a number of domain specific sessions. The program is online at http://www.irit.fr/CDM08/. At 18 hundred hours, we had a welcome reception at the City Hall (Capitole) and a Toulouse Guided Tour. Then I had a quiet dinner at La Cantina des Blachers with Gloria Phillips-Wren (Loyola) and Mary Daly (Cork). The conversation, food and wine was excellent.

This morning, July 3, Leif Edvinsson gave a keynote on intellectual capital and knowledge navigation. Leif tries to be provocative and stimulating and sometimes succeeds. I am still not persuaded we can quantify, encourage or develop meaningful "intellectual capital" in companies or countries. Leif is a true believer however and he tries to persuade us it is important. Somehow again the link to collaboration was lost. Does colaboaration increase intellectual capital and if so how.

After talks on mobile decision support and enjoyable lunch conversation with Tung Bui (Hawaii), I made my way here to check email and blog. Time to return to sessions and the conference dinner this evening.

A bientot,

Technorati Tags: collaborative decision making, Business Intelligence, Decision Support

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