President's Letter

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Congregating in Boston

by Krishna S. Dhir, Berry College

Soon we will be packing our bags for travel, in anticipation of renewing our friendships and making new ones in Boston. One of the oldest cities in the United States, Boston is regarded by many as the capital of New England. While the city was founded by the Puritans from England, today it is a highly diverse community representing every part of the world.

Program Chair Ken Boyer of Ohio State University has been hard at work to ensure a superb experience for us all. He is developing an excellent program, promoting decision sciences as a catalyst for interdisciplinary exchange and cultural change. I hope the members of the Institute will respond to this effort and develop decision aids and technologies for significant societal impact.

Eliyahu Goldratt, the originator of the Optimized Production Technology, the Theory of Constraints, and a number of other decision tools, had committed to speak at the Boston meeting in a plenary session, prior to his untimely passing. To recognize his many contributions to our field, Lisa Scheinkopf and Bill Rhind of Goldratt Consulting Limited will provide us the Goldratt Memorial plenary session, reviewing Goldratt's many contributions to the management of organizations and discussing his vision for collaboration between academia and business.

Six additional plenary sessions with outstanding invited speakers are planned for the Boston meeting. Speakers include:

• Steven Eppinger, General Motors LGO Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: How does Gen Y think and make decisions?
• Dean Oliver, Director of Production Analytics at ESPN: How does one allocate performance credit (and salary adjustments) among individual members for achievements of a team?
• John Halamka, MD, Chief Information Officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center: How do emerging technologies liberate data from electronic health records and hospital information systems in ways that empower users to manage population health, make strategic business decisions and measure quality?
• Eric von Hippel, Wilson Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: How are communities of users becoming powerful innovation engines, driving manufacturers out of product development altogether?
• John Toussaint, Lean healthcare guru and CEO Emeritus of ThedaCare: What are effective leaders doing to change the culture of healthcare organization? What do they need to change in existing practices?
• Luk Van Wassenhove, Henry Ford Chaired Professor of Manufacturing at INSEAD: How to better respond to human disasters through supply chain management adapted to the humanitarian context?

Last year, a new format of "Speed Discussion" sessions was introduced to provide participants with an opportunity to interact in small groups with officers of the Institute. Discussants rotated on to a different discussion group every 20 minutes, allowing a number of participants an opportunity for an effective discussion on a range of issues. These sessions proved highly effective, and are planned again: one to provide an opportunity to speak in a small group format with journal editors including editors of Decision Sciences, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, and Journal of Operations Management; another to provide an opportunity to interact with DSI Fellows, including incoming inductees for 2011; and yet another to interact in a similar format with the current leaders of the Institute, including the members of the Board of Directors. Speed discussions facilitating interactive research and teaching exchange are also planned to provide opportunities for researchers to engage in small groups as opposed to the usual stand-and-present sessions.

The Institute continues to incorporate technologies to improve the transactions of its meetings. Twitter will be used in several featured sessions to encourage a backchannel of discussion and to complement the presentations. The DSI Annual Meeting in Boston promises to provide our members with the best conference experience to date. The momentum generated through innovations of the past few years continues to offer enhanced learning opportunities. High quality interactions with researchers presenting their best works will be interspersed with the excellent cuisine of Boston and the music of The Bostonians of Boston College, the famed co-ed a capella group, singing pop, rock, and rhythm & blues. Come and join us in Boston!

 

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