Plant Services - July 2008 - (Page 49)

WEB HUNTER Cyborgian Choices Using a decision support system to take a load off your overworked mind I ’d be willing to bet that if you scanned your environment right now and pondered the state of your company, you’d be able to provide several splendid examples of less-than-stellar decisions some of your contemporaries have managed to inflict on the entire organization. Sometimes the reasons for having done so are quite obvious, sometimes not. What is certain, though, is that as the number of input variables affecting the final decision increases much beyond The collective action of so many players, a prediction market, constitutes a decision support system. two or three, the human brain loses its ability to justify calling ourselves homo sapiens. In the real world, the amount of data to be evaluated can be overwhelming. Perhaps the data are valid, but even so, it’s probably incomplete, messy and appears to differ little from a series of random numbers or facts. There must be a way to make sense of that hash in the industrial world. It can be done. You’ve heard of the electronic trading systems used in the financial markets. Skilled traders systematically reduce their experience and intuition to a set of rules that a computer executes to return clear, unambiguous buy and sell signals much faster than a human can. Sometimes the computer itself initiates the trades. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a money machine. Join me for a leap into that digital morass we call the Web in search of practical, zero-cost, noncommercial, registrationfree resources that ought to help you when you’re “the decider.” Remember, we search the Web so you don’t have to. Laboratory at the School of Information Sciences and Intelligent Systems Program at the University of Pittsburgh. I hesitate to refer to them as prototypical ivory-tower types because they’ve written a 15-page paper titled “Decision support systems” that avoids any use of the abstract, esoteric and abstruse, which should make it perfectly comprehensible to anyone reading this column. The paper explains the characteristics of decision problems and how computer programs can support decision making. It goes on to detail the various DSS components and the role they play in decision support. The authors introduce an emergent class of something called normative systems and decision-analytic DSS. Finally, they review issues related to DSS user interfaces and the importance they have to the quality of any computer-assisted decision. You might as well decide to wander over to www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/psfiles/dss.pdf and spend quality time with the document. It will be worth it. Funding medicine An easy read So, what exactly do we mean by the term decision support system (DSS)? You can bet it involves a computer. Beyond that, it would be better to pay a visit to academia and talk to the experts. In this case, I’d suggest you contact Marek J. Druzdzel and Roger R. Flynn from the Decision Systems July 2008 You no doubt have heard the old joke about the guy who goes to the optometrist for a new set of spectacles and, naturally, asks about price. The optometrist tells him it will be $75. When the stunned guy hesitates, the optometrist quickly adds, “per lens.” When the guy, now in shock, still doesn’t respond, the optometrist says, “plus frames.” Capitalism is all about negotiating for the best price you can get, and researchers in the medical profession know how to exploit a DSS to maximize returns for practitioners. If you think this is a joke, the next Web article citation is titled “Willingness-to-pay utility assessment: feasibility of use in normative patient decision support systems,” by Flowers, Garber, Bergen and Lenert, all from the Stanford University School of Medicine. The link (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357621) takes you to an abstract of the article. That’s the best I could do. I found it impossible to finesse the digital morass to access the full text at any of the sites that mention the piece. The bottom line: You probably should be circumspect when talking to anyone in the medical field. 49 www.PLANTSERVICES.com http://www.pitt.edu/~druzdzel/psfiles/dss.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357621 http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com

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Plant Services - July 2008 Contents From the Editor Letters The PS Files Up and Running Crisis Corner Asset Manager Technology Toolbox Cover Story Compressors Power Transmission Flooring Web Hunter In the Trenches Product Picks Classifieds Energy Expert

Plant Services - July 2008

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