Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!psuvm!uh2
From: UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer)
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems
Subject: MBA seminar in Office Information Systems
Message-ID: <90003.133030UH2@PSUVM.BITNET>
Date: 3 Jan 90 18:30:30 GMT
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 48

I trying to collect a broad array of ideas that cover the topic of
Office Information Systems of the near future.  I am interested in current
systems that corporations use, or that can be purchased from vendors, but
I am more interested in ideas which lean toward
the future.  I am building a sysllabus for an MBA seminar for non-specialists.
Some topics I've considered so far include:


Expert Systems -- Both rule based and connectionist ideas about how to
increase the availability of expertise in an organization.

Decision Support -- Two ideas here.  One is to look at commercially available
"integrated" user systems (I'd probably have to use IBM's AS) which include
database (SQL), statistics (SAS), graphics (pie charts and such), spreadsheet,
and so on.

The other is to look atadvanced characteristics of word processors and
spreadsheets and dbms, or at
"Influence Analysis"  as represented by the software
DAVID on the Mac.

Group DSS -- PARC's CoLab, Arizona'a GDSS lab system, and ???

Systems that "improve" group work, such as Email and computer conferencing.
Especially, I'd like to look at work that imposes structure on Email.  I've
heard a little about a system called GIBIS---references welcome.

Information Retrieval -- Systems that permit efficient and productive
browsing through large corpuses of text.  In particular, wht methods are
used to share knowledge about customers, products, policies, and so on,
which brings us to

HyperText -- We'll surely look at some of the articles in the recent CACM
issue on HT, and we'll play with HyperCard (I *know* it isn't really HT).
Has anyone looked at the HyperText software that ACM delivered with the
HT issue.  Is it worth using?

Technology -- I think that MBA students need some exposure to the underlying
techniques.  Distributed database, OS, and file systems, and the communications
sublayer.


*******

What have I left out.  What's hot, and what's not.  What good articles and
reference books can you recommend.  Why me?

lee sailer