The founders of the DSS Lab have over twenty years each of experience in the decision support industry. Their expertise spans a broad range of areas including the design and development of DSS products and the design and implementation of innovative business intelligence / decision support solutions.

Erik Thomsen, Chief Scientist has over 20 years experience creating state-of-the-art analytical software technologies and the business applications they support in addition to high level consulting to technology consumers, vendors, and industry organizations. He is the author or co-author of several text books including OLAP Solutions: Building Multidimensional Information Systems, 2nd edition, which is used in both graduate computer science and MBA programs. He has been sought after by government agencies since the mid 90's on complex modeling issues such as fusing together economic, environmental and demographic information.

Prior to re-joining DSSlab, Erik was distinguished scientist at Hyperion Solutions. There, his activities included:

• Next generation database software design, (and associated patents),
  Language design for heterogeneous query systems that work over a wide range of underlying data sources without forcing data into some particular format (typically multidimensional or Relational),
• Performance management requirements specification,
• Computational models of enterprise risk and organizational learning, and
• Sustainability reporting.

Prior to joining Hyperion, Erik was chief scientist at Dimensional Systems, a consulting organization that specialized in decision support/BI model design, implementation, and custom programming with an emphasis on combining OLAP (or multidimensional databases), data mining, visualization, text processing and GIS technologies. His clients included some of the world's premier organizations such as Intel, AC Nielsen, Oracle, Microsoft, and Lucent.

Erik was also an aggregation specialist at the World Bank. There he implemented a variety of socio-environmental-economic models (national level triple bottom line reports) including

• The one for the World Bank's 50th anniversary global report on poverty,
• The Bank's model of the environment for the first Earth summit in Rio in 1992 and
• A multidimensional performance management model for water and sanitation in East Java Bali.

After more than a decade, his method of aggregating irregular data is still the basis for how the World Bank calculates these kinds of national accounts

In 1988, he co-founded the software company Power Thinking Tools where he designed FreeThink, a multidimensional database that was the first product in the industry to provide bi-directional cell-level dependency tracking, embedded multidimensional statistics, the ability to link and aggregate documents and multidimensional visualization capabilities. At PTT, he was awarded a patent for creating multi-leveled hierarchies and multi-level variables that occupy different calculation states across those hierarchies -one of the fundamental patents in the field of multidimensional databases.

Over the years, he has chaired a variety of industry organizations including the OLAP Council and the Analytical Solutions Forum. He has been an invited speaker, keynote or chair at many conferences and workshops. And he is the author of numerous publications for both scholarly and trade journals. He wrote the Decision Support Column for Database Programming & Design, and the Analytical Solutions column for Intelligent Enterprise.

A partial sampling of his publications and presentations can be found here.

mail: ethomsen (AT) dsslab (DOT) com

George is the lead author of MDX Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and Hyperion Essbase, 2nd Edition. (John Wiley and Sons, 2005). He also authored the first edition of MDX Solutions and co-authored, with Mr. Thomsen, Microsoft OLAP Solutions, published in July 1999 by John Wiley & Sons. George was also a co-founder of Dimensional Systems. Prior to DSS Lab and Dimensional Systems, Mr. Spofford was the chief product architect for the OLAP portion of an integrated OLAP-relational DBMS product at Computer Corporation of America (CCA). The product provided full support for multidimensional modeling as well as warehouse summarization. At Power Thinking Tools, he was VP of Engineering and lead developer of FreeThink, a 32-bit desktop MD modeling and analysis tool with integrated visualization for business and scientific analysis.

mail: gspofford (AT) dsslab (DOT) com