At the University of Florida, extensive course material is being developed to impart decision support system development skills to undergraduate and graduate students in industrial engineering and operations research (IE/OR) and business school students. Decision support systems (DSS) combine databases, spreadsheets, models, analysis, optimization, simulation, and allow user interactability with graphical user interfaces and are being widely used in industries these days. Several faculty members at other universities have expressed the desire to learn this course material and offer these courses in their departments. To meet this need, the following two three-day instructor-training workshops are being offered: (i) Developing Spreadsheet-Based Decision Support Systems; (ii) Developing Web-Enabled Decision Support Systems from August 1 to August 7, 2004. The workshop website www.ise.ufl.edu/dss provides more details about these workshops. These workshops will teach the subject material of two courses and will also provide suggestions on how to teach these courses successfully. Several faculty members and senior doctoral students beginning academic careers are expected to attend these workshops and this grant will cover part of their expenses.
These workshops are expected to be attended by over 100 participants and will facilitate the development of several decision support systems development courses at many universities. It is also expected that these courses will become required courses for undergraduate students. The skills imparted by these courses will give them sufficient background to develop spreadsheet or database based and web-enabled decision support systems. As organizations become larger and more complex in the years to come, decision support systems will gain widespread popularity, and knowing how to develop such systems will make IE/OR and business school students active participants in the information revolution transforming our society.
