Geoffrion: INFORMS 1995 Election Position Statement

POSITION STATEMENT

Arthur M. Geoffrion
Candidate for INFORMS President

1995

I am very pleased and honored to stand for election to the highest office of INFORMS.

The future of our profession turns, I believe, on three urgent needs, and these would be my highest priorities after attending to whatever urgent matters may require Presidential attention. Specifically:

To develop new electronic services for the extended INFORMS community.
To partner more closely and synergistically with Information Technology.
To focus on the many tens of thousands of dispersed practitioners who chose not to join ORSA or TIMS.

These needs are far from independent. Let me say a few words about each.

Electronic Services

Much of my teaching during the last two years has focused on how the Internet and its competitors can be used to advantage by professionals in OR/MS and other disciplines. It turns out that virtually all phases of OR/MS work can benefit in important ways from E-mail, ftp, gopher, mail lists, telnet, USENET, the world-wide web, dial-up BBSs, and the commercial on-line services catering to individuals (e.g., CompuServe) or to organizations (e.g., Nexis).

Professional societies like INFORMS are among the types of organizations that would benefit greatly by reinventing themselves around these new communication-centered technologies. This is so because electronic media are inherently superior in certain ways to mail, meetings, and the printed page for providing value to a heterogeneous membership scattered around the globe. The traditional media will of course remain essential, and deserve further efforts to perfect them, but INFORMS will grow much more rapidly in size and effectiveness if they are complemented by the new media.

INFORMS has made important strides in developing electronic services. I have advocated and had the pleasure of working on some of these, and would champion still bolder efforts to electronically serve the entire INFORMS community even beyond the limits of its membership.

Information Technology

We are all familiar with the stunning advances in computers and communications technology. These advances provide unprecedented opportunities for OR/MS. But they also compete directly with OR/MS in the minds of potential patrons because they often enable organizational improvements on a scale beyond what OR/MS usually is able to accomplish through its traditional scientific and mathematical approaches.

It follows that our profession should partner aggressively with Information Technology. Applying OR/MS to IT and IT to OR/MS are very worthwhile, but the greatest successes can be expected from a more symmetric approach in which both are applied together synergistically to the full range of organizational problems.

INFORMS could promote more effective partnering by sponsoring professional development events, cooperating with professional associations such as ACM, emphasizing IT in our meetings and publications, and by making the most of the important initiatives being spawned by the VP-level Information Technology Committee.

Dispersed Practitioners

Barring a reversal of long-standing historic trends in the organizational placement of the OR/MS function, by far the largest part of future OR/MS applications will be done by practitioners without the support of an organized OR/MS group.

Since the vitality of our field -- academia included -- depends ultimately on successful applications, it follows that INFORMS should strive mightily to support dispersed practitioners. The reward for doing this well will be greater impact on the world economy, greater demand for OR/MS projects, greater student interest in OR/MS, and healthy membership growth for INFORMS (since many tens of thousands of dispersed practitioners have yet to join).

In Closing

When I formed the Management Science Roundtable for leaders of OR/MS groups as one of my TIMS presidential initiatives more than a decade ago, I did not expect to remain actively involved for more than a few years. Yet I am as active today as ever. Why?

The reason is that the Roundtable has proven to be the best way by far for me to understand what is happening outside the secure world of academia, and to indulge my interest in professional issues. What I have seen through the eyes of its members, together with my own experience as a professor and consultant, all leads me to conclude that the three directions sketched above are essential for our profession to achieve the destiny we all desire. With your support, I would welcome an opportunity to pursue these directions through INFORMS.

Those who wish to know my views in greater detail are invited to read my article "Forces, Trends, and Opportunities in MS/OR," Operations Research, May-June 1992 (a written version of my Omega Rho plenary).