FROM THE EDITOR

TERRY R. RAKES, Decision Line Editor Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

By the time this issue reaches you, the annual meeting in Boston will be only a few weeks away. Thus, much of this issue is devoted to items and announcements pertaining to the meeting. Ernie Houck and his Program Committee have developed an outstanding program, and I hope you will be in Boston to share in the experience. Once again this year, the preliminary conference program is available on the DSI gopher. While you should have received a newspaper format preliminary program, the electronic version is updated periodically and can be searched using key-word search capabilities.

One of the important items related to the meeting is the reservation process for meal functions. In this issue, we have included an explanation of this process. I encourage you to read this explanation so that you will understand more about the difficult balancing act which is required when estimating meal attendance.

A cornerstone of the Institute is our focus on both discipline-specific and interdisciplinary research and teaching. In keeping with this interdisciplinary theme, this issue of Decision Line presents a collection of feature columns with broad significance.

John C. Anderson, president of the Institute, gets things off to a start in his President's Letter with some background on the interdisciplinary focus of the Institute. John not only outlines specific strategies that have resulted from this focus, but also describes future plans for interdisciplinary initiatives.

Our remaining feature columns present a broad range of topics. In the International Issues column, Andre M. Everett, University of Otago, discusses the management of change as New Zealand has transitioned from a stagnant economy to a role model for economic reform. In the Research Issues column, Laura B. Forker, Boston University, addresses the area of research on quality. Building upon past arguments presented in Decision Line that additional empirical research is needed in OM that makes a contribution to theoretical knowledge in the field, she addresses the question of whether the body of knowledge pertaining to quality is being built that will contribute to theory development and theory examination. In the Production/Operations Management column in our last issue (July 1995), Peter W. Stonebraker, Northeastern Illinois University, and Alexander Arcentovich Lobut and Sergei Nicholaevich Polbitsyn, Urals State Pedagogic University, described the effect of Russia's movement toward a market economy on manufacturing conditions in one Siberian center of heavy industry. In this issue, Stonebraker, Lobut, and Polbitsyn describe the educational environment in developing Russian business colleges, with emphasis on the same region in Siberia.

In the Information Technology column, Lance Eliot, Eliot & Associates, states that many MBA programs provide scant attention to information technology, and argues that MBAs should be better trained to work within an electronically connected, digital world. Richard L. Morris and Barbara A. Price, Winthrop University, use the In The Classroom column as a forum to describe the use of a spreadsheet and the resampling technique as a better method of teaching certain aspects of the introductory statistics course. In The Specialist With A Universal Mind, Andrew Vazsonyi, University of San Francisco, outlines the changes in organizational structure that have resulted from reengineering and downsizing in companies. Vazsonyi then describes the use of client/server groupware for facilitating the types of information flow necessary within these new company structures. In the Doctoral Issues column, Harvey J. Brightman, Georgia State University, discusses the conditions necessary for teaching to retain its position of importance relative to research and the importance of training doctoral students in the art of teaching. George A. Marcoulides, California State University - Fullerton, is the author of this issue's Software Review, in which he reviews LISREL8 with PRELIS2 for analyzing structural equation models. In From The Bookshelf, Andrew Ruppel, University of Virginia, presents two recent volumes that deal with the topic of creativity enhancement. As you can see, this issue covers a broad range of topics. I hope you will find several of interest.

At the beginning of this column, I mentioned the electronic version of the preliminary program available on the Internet. Although we have publicized DSI's efforts in electronic information sharing, we still get calls indicating that people are not aware of what is out there. At this time, the DSI gopher has information about the Institute, how to use the DSI gopher, the 1995 annual meeting program, the annual meeting workshops and other meeting information, information about the Decision Sciences journal, current and archived issues of Decision Line, information about membership and placement, a 1995 calendar, and a list of related gopher servers. The DSI gopher is at gopher.gsu.edu under "The World Outside GSU." If you prefer not to use gopher but to "surf the net" instead, a home page link is provided by Georgia State University's Decision Sciences Department (http://dsc.gsu.edu/). In the upcoming months, DSI will make its own home page available. For more information on the Institute's activities in electronic information sharing, or to suggest additions to the DSI gopher menu, contact me at trrakes@ vtvm1.cc.vt.edu or Hal Jacobs at hjacobs@ gsu.edu.

See you in Boston!