October is a lively time of year at Syncopation Software. As the leaves start dropping at our home base in New England, business tends to pick up. In addition to our code monkeys (i.e., everyone but myself) diligently plugging away on DPL, our preparations for exhibiting at the INFORMS Annual Meeting are in full swing, while a multitude of inquiries from the many students prompted by their professors to download our free DPL trial license are also being dealt with.
All this autumnal commotion caused me to nearly overlook one very important biennial event that has also occurred this October: the publication of the Decision Analysis Software Survey in OR/MS Today magazine.
Go ahead, and take a look at it here:
http://www.orms-today.org/surveys/das/das.html
Checklists are pretty limited as way of looking at software: as a user, you want to know that a tool doesn’t just check off your requirements but really meets your needs. That said, the DA software survey is a handy list of who is in this space and what (they say) they can do.
We personally use it as a benchmark to see where we stand amongst our DA counterparts, to identify trends and shifts within the DA software community, and to internally generate ideas for new features and enhancements.
We additionally hope that the survey will incite a dialog between ourselves and potential or current users who may look at DPL’s survey entries and see an “N” (meaning we don’t have the feature) in a column where they’d like to see a “Y”. To put it more simply, if there is a feature, capability, resource, or compatibility brought up in the survey that you wish DPL offered then let us know. We always welcome helpful suggestions: sales@syncopation.com
Lastly, kudos to the INFORMS and OR/MS Today staff who have, for 21 years, brought together this great biennial resource for individuals who seek to move beyond rules-of-thumb, intuition, and simply possessing “big data” and instead seek high-powered, cutting-edge tools that will wield the data at their disposal to take on the vast array of alternatives, uncertainties, and contingencies that characterize today’s complex business decisions.