A QUESTION-DRIVEN STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY OR/MS PRACTICE
October 20, 1995
Arthur Geoffrion
TO: INFORMS Board
CC: E. Duncan, M. DeMelim, G. Freestone, T. Spencer
FROM: A. Geoffrion for the Roundtable
SUBJ: Joint Board-Roundtable Meeting to Discuss
"A Question-Driven Study of Contemporary OR/MS Practice"
DATE: October 20, 1995
What follows is 13 pages of notes describing the initiative to
be discussed at the joint meeting of the Board and the Roundtable
in New Orleans on Monday afternoon: "A Question-Driven Study of
Contemporary OR/MS Practice".
This was a team effort over the last three months by many
people, including an ad hoc Pre-Steering Committee comprising Tom
Baker, Burnell Brown, Arthur Geoffrion, Sid Hess, Mark Lembersky,
Randy Robinson, Leon Schwartz, and Tom Spencer. Now in its
fourth draft, earlier drafts have been commented upon by the
Roundtable Executive Committee, Al Blumstein, John Birge, Robert
Fildes, George Freestone, Terry Harrison, John Llewellyn, John
Ranyard, and Mike Rothkopf. All deserve thanks for their
contributions.
These notes, which are being distributed today to all
Roundtable members as well, have been changed in numerous but
mostly evolutionary ways from the third draft of October 15 which
a few of you received. Perhaps the most significant change, in
response to advice from those who just completed a major study of
OR practice sponsored by the Operational Research Society,
relates to funding.
You will be asked at the meeting to help improve the Draft
Project Plan Guidelines below, to authorize and fund the project,
and to appoint an official Steering Committee.
Just one more thing: the project as proposed may be overly
ambitious for the human resources realistically available to
coordinate it. Please think about how to cut it down to more
manageable proportions (e.g., by dropping many of the key
questions), and whether a pilot study is needed.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful consideration.
There are different interpretations of the current status of
OR/MS when one looks at what is happening to industrial groups,
to academic groups and their curricular role, and to INFORMS
membership trends. There are causes for alarm and causes for
optimism.
However one interprets these trends and developments, there
should be general agreement that the key to improving the future
of OR/MS in general is to improve the prosperity of OR/MS in
practice.
How to improve the prosperity of OR/MS in practice? By
seriously studying and trying to understand the contemporary
practice scene much better than we do, and then by using this
understanding to strengthen how OR/MS is practiced, to strengthen
INFORMS' services for practitioners, and to strengthen the
academic programs that train future practitioners and those who
will develop applicable theory and methods.
The Roundtable proposes to undertake, in partnership with the
INFORMS Board, a major project that aims to travel down the road
just indicated. This initiative will be the main topic for the
Board/Roundtable meeting scheduled for Monday afternoon in New
Orleans.
10/20 DRAFT PROJECT PLAN GUIDELINES
PROJECT TITLE
"A Question-Driven Study of Contemporary OR/MS Practice"
PURPOSE
To study and better understand the present state and major
trends of OR/MS practice, including employment, and therefrom
to obtain facts and insights of immediate value to:
(a) practitioners as they strive to survive and succeed in
the face of rapid change and organizational challenges,
(b) the INFORMS Board as it strives to position INFORMS to
attract many more practitioner members, and
(c) educators as they strive to attract and properly train
tomorrow's practitioners, and to update today's
practitioners.
Do this in a way that is driven by carefully chosen key
questions. Do this with a carefully "segmented" view of the
practice landscape that recognizes its lack of homogeneity,
comprising as it does diverse kinds of practitioners. Do this
comprehensively, but at the lowest possible cost through an
electronically coordinated network of project volunteers.
5-PHASE PROJECT STRUCTURE
1. Compose a list of key practice-focused questions, good
answers to which would strategically and tactically inform
practitioners, the INFORMS Board, and educators. Design a
segmented view of the world of practice.
2. Marshal already existing data and knowledge as it pertains
to the key questions.
3. Broadly collect data and views on the key questions.
Emphasize interviews and open discussions with practitioners
and their clients over traditional surveys, taking care to
preserve anonymity when necessary for candid response.
Summarization and synthesis activities should not lose any
primary data.
4. Place most primary data and all project results in an
on-line knowledge base for INFORMS members to access and
analyze as they wish. Moreover, make it easy for
practitioners, at their own initiative while on-line, to add
further contributions and comments to this knowledge base.
Practice Online and INFORMS Online will be the primary sites.
On-line materials should begin appearing by early in 1996.
5. Distill and organize what is learned from #2 and #3 for
action-oriented consumption by the INFORMS Board,
practitioners, and educators.
KEY QUESTIONS
Most key questions are phrased in terms of "OR/MS practice
segments". This notion, which seems prerequisite to sufficiently
discriminating conclusions, will be explained shortly.
The litmus test for each key question is that it should be of
great interest to one or more of the INFORMS Board, practitioners,
and those who educate practitioners. The final list of questions
will drive the entire study, and probably should be many fewer
than the possibilities listed here.
Employment What is the recent history of OR/MS practitioner
employment (incl. job openings) during the last 5 years in
each OR/MS practice segment? Compile data from cooperating
organizations, including information on career ladders. What
major employment-influencing dynamics and trends have been at
work during the last decade? (To see dynamics and trends
clearly, it is best to look at a fairly long time period.)
BLS Clarification Are the Bureau of Labor Statistics
estimates for OR/MS employment valid? What adjustments are
advisable? With approximate adjustments applied, what
employment picture emerges for OR/MS and what is the "market
share" of INFORMS' membership?
Career Paths What are the typical career paths of
practitioners in each OR/MS practice segment? Compile
individual histories, including their perceptions of de facto
career ladders (as distinguished from official ones). Do not
overlook people who leave OR/MS.
OR/MS Opportunities What have been the greatest
opportunities for each OR/MS practice segment during the last
decade, and why? Compile examples of where these
opportunities have been exploited successfully.
OR/MS Threats What have been the greatest threats to each
OR/MS practice segment during the last decade, and why?
Compile examples of where these threats have caused damage.
Exemplars What are the most successful groups and
individuals in each OR/MS practice segment? Compile interview
materials aimed at explaining why, and look for the main
segment-specific success factors, if any, beyond the ones
commonly cited. ("Success" might be measured by rate of
growth, documented benefit/cost ratios, and/or degree of
self-determination.)
Obituaries What OR/MS groups were disbanded or
decentralized in each OR/MS practice segment? Who was fired?
What OR/MS projects failed? Compile interview materials aimed
at explaining why, and look for the main segment-specific risk
factors responsible for the unfortunate outcomes.
Awareness How aware of the potential contributions of OR/MS
are prospective sponsors and users in each of the practice
segments? What measures can improve awareness, and what are
their rough cost/benefit ratios? Compile hard data, opinions,
and evidence concerning the effectiveness of past
awareness-building measures.
IT's Role What role does the rapidly developing area of
Information Technology play in each OR/MS practice segment?
How is it changing the conduct of OR/MS? How have OR/MS
groups fared when associated organizationally with IS or some
other IT-related group? What are the main opportunities for
INFORMS to cooperate with SIM and ACM, and would this help?
Compile specific examples and views.
Internet's Role What value has the Internet yielded
organizationally and to OR/MS professionals in each OR/MS
practice segment? Compile specific examples. What are the
most promising areas for expanded Internet use, and why?
Non-INFORMS Practitioners Who are the non-INFORMS
practitioners in each OR/MS practice segment? Compile their
Email, fax, and postal addresses, and job descriptions.
Usefulness of INFORMS Services For each type of service
that INFORMS currently provides, how truly valuable is it to
each OR/MS practice segment, and why? (Structure this
question around a simple taxonomy of INFORMS services/
activities.) How could the value of each service be
improved? Compile individual views.
Desired INFORMS Services What new INFORMS services would be
of greatest value to each OR/MS practice segment, and why?
(Partially structure this question around a simple but
open-ended taxonomy of possible new services, including
electronic services.) Compile individual views.
Choosing a Professional Association How do practitioners in
each OR/MS practice segment decide which professional
association to join? How could INFORMS compete more
successfully in each OR/MS practice segment? Compile
individual views and specific choices.
Choosing Meetings How do practitioners in each OR/MS
practice segment decide which professional meetings to attend?
(Well-run meetings can produce large profits.) How could
INFORMS meetings compete more successfully in each OR/MS
practice segment? Compile individual views and historical
choices.
Educating Future Practitioners Undergraduate, masters, and
Ph.D. education in OR/MS: which degrees, kinds of courses, and
pedagogical styles are most useful for each OR/MS practice
segment, and why? Compile individual experiences and views.
(Take pains to make this information available to students.)
Updating Current Practitioners What are the greatest
continuing education and seminar needs for each OR/MS practice
segment, and why? (Don't overlook topics that fall outside
OR/MS and its supporting disciplines, like communication and
organizational intervention skills.) Compile individual views.
SEGMENTATION
The OR/MS practitioner community needs to be "segmented"
throughout the project, starting with data gathering, because the
answers to many key questions may vary substantially across
segments.
A segment is defined for present purposes as a discrete-valued
attribute associated with a practitioner or client. N such
attributes would create a N-dimensional segmentation.
One obviously important dimension is to distinguish between
practitioners who are part of an organized group with OR/MS
responsibility and those who are not (so-called isolated or
dispersed practitioners). This dichotomy could be refined to
distinguish those who practice OR/MS part-time (their primary job
being teaching or some other non-OR/MS responsibility) and those
who practice OR/MS as their primary job.
Another important dimension is economic sector. The partition
could be rough -- e.g., consulting services, non-consulting
services, goods-producing, government/public sector, and military
-- or somewhat finer.
In addition, the population could be segmented by functional
responsibility, by favored OR/MS technique, or by "strand of
practice" in the sense of Corbett et al. (1995).
Information providers should be classified as to whether they
are currently an INFORMS member, a lapsed former member of ORSA
or TIMS, or never a member of one of these associations. This
should permit discerning any important differences between
members and non-members, and is pertinent to several key
questions.
Whatever the segmentation design turns out to be, time will
automatically be an additional dimension at the yearly level of
granularity. This attribute, to be attached to all observations
(not the year of recording, but rather the year to which the
observation pertains), will permit summaries and analyses in
which time is significant.
The segmentation design should take into consideration which
particular segmentation dimensions are likely to be pertinent to
each key question.
MULTIPLE DISPERSED PROJECT TEAMS
The Network Age makes it possible, through the Internet and
other networks, for even a widely dispersed team to work
effectively toward its objective. It also provides the enabling
technologies for coordinating multiple subteams. The project will
exploit these possibilities extensively, relying on a Steering
Committee for overall coordination of multiple Project Teams. A
team can be as small as one person, and will be expected to
function nearly autonomously once accepted into the project.
Each Project Team will focus on some subset of the Segment x
Key Question matrix. This matrix has many cells. Some Project
Teams may elect to work on an entire row (i.e., to study broadly
a single segment) or on an entire column (i.e., to study broadly
a single question). Other Project Teams may prefer to work on a
single cell or some set of cells. All possibilities are welcome
so long as the people in each Project Team are qualified and
motivated. Duplicate coverage of cells will not be discouraged,
but the Steering Committee will coordinate such situations. It
will also seek to promote as much consistency as possible among
Project Team activities (e.g., their interviewing techniques).
The Project Teams will be formed from volunteers during the
first few months of 1996. The Steering Committee will help
volunteers with similar interests find each other and will
perform inter-team coordination after formation. In both tasks,
Email reflectors are likely to play an important role.
Every non-academic Roundtable representative will be
invited to volunteer to coordinate an all-key-question
canvas of as many OR/MS workers in their organization as
possible. Thus, ideally, there will be more than 40
Project Teams from Roundtable member organizations.
CPMS members will be invited to volunteer to coordinate
similar canvases of their organizations, although more
sharply focused canvases also will be welcome.
The INFORMS membership at large will be invited to
volunteer teams with any segment/key-question focus.
Participation by academic departments as well as companies
will be most welcome; we hope that many will decide that
this is the right time to conduct a class project or
alumni-tracking study of their own that dovetails with this
project. ACORD (Association of Chairs of OR Departments in
universities) is the perfect body to orchestrate team
formation in academia, and President John Birge has placed
this topic on its Fall Meeting Agenda for discussion.
Non-INFORMS volunteers will be welcome also. For example,
we hope that some neighboring professional associations can
be induced to conduct a study of their own that dovetails
with this one.
Since the project relies so heavily on volunteers, it is
important to know what incentives will attract them. Partial list:
- the satisfaction of doing important pro bono work for the
profession at a time of great need
- early access to project materials and results
- visibility in the OR/MS community
- public credits given by INFORMS and the Roundtable (consider
how to credit particularly good project work)
- a good excuse to get in touch with people with whom there is
good reason to establish or improve contact (e.g., most
universities find it valuable to improve contacts with local
industry and professional alumni)
- publication opportunities.
The last item could be a particularly potent motivator for
academic volunteers. To take full advantage of it, the project
needs the support of the editors of Interfaces, OR/MS Today,
ITORMS (the new Interactive Transactions on Operations Research
and Management Science) and as many other INFORMS publications as
possible. Editors should be asked to invite project-based
submissions under special reviewing guidelines designed to
encourage and expedite publication of project results. John
Llewellyn and Mike Rothkopf already have stated their intention
to cooperate.
Editorial cooperation means much more to the project than
merely providing outlets for worthy work, important as that is:
it gives access to editorial staffs and reviewers whose business
is quality control and clear exposition. This should greatly
relieve the Steering Committee of much of the work that would
otherwise inevitably fall to it.
Expert advice should be sought on coordination and net-based
survey methods, and on appropriate tools to support them (e.g.,
contact management and text database software). No more Project
Teams should be accepted than can reasonably be coordinated by
the Steering Committee using the best available procedures and
tools.
INTERNET
The Internet is this project's critical enabling technology.
Without it, a project of this magnitude would be utterly
impractical to coordinate or execute even with the able
assistance of editorial staffs and reviewers (as just noted).
Consequently, the Internet must be exploited aggressively to
reduce the project's labor requirements and costs as much as
possible, to shorten its schedule, and to facilitate dialog-style
interaction with practitioners and their clients on the key
questions (it remains to be seen how effective this last use can
be by comparison with telephone and face-to-face interaction).
In addition to familiar Email and file transfer capabilities
like ftp, the Internet offers INFORMS Online (INFORMS' official
web server), Practice Online (a moderated Email reflector/file
server and also a web server for the practitioner community
co-sponsored by Interfaces, the Roundtable, and CPMS), ORCS-L (an
Email reflector focusing on the OR/Computer Science interface),
sci.op-research (an Internet USENET newsgroup catering to OR/MS)
and several other news groups, WORMS (an OR web server in
Australia), etc. Here are some examples of Internet use:
The Internet can put the Project Plan into wide circulation
long before it appears in OR/MS Today: simply announce it
through the various Internet channels just mentioned.
OR/MS Today should still carry the full Project Plan along
with an invitation to readers to offer suggestions (e.g.,
data sources that might otherwise be overlooked), and the
December issue should carry a prominent notice about the
project and where to find the full Project Plan on-line
(closing date Nov. 6).
Email can be used as a speedy no-cost substitute for postal
mail surveys. Since respondents can just hit Reply and
fill in the blanks, the response rate may be fairly high.
Web pages with embedded forms should also be effective
(this raises the intriguing prospect of practitioners being
able to contribute data to the project without anyone
having to contact them!).
Email reflectors, USENET news groups, and also discussion
forums on Aol and CompuServe can be used to discuss the key
questions and air Project Teams' findings and conclusions
as they emerge. It can be expected that discussants will
offer personal experiences, information about their
organizations, cogent criticisms, alternative viewpoints,
and constructive suggestions. Of course, Project Teams
will have to provide the discussion leaders.
Practice Online (sketched above) should play a leading role
for both discussion and the project's on-line knowledge
base. Terry Harrison and Mike Rothkopf are fully
cooperative.
The on-line knowledge base to be created by this project
will be its centerpiece, structured and designed so that
Project Teams can flesh it out with little or no
interaction with the Steering Committee, and even so that
individuals can contribute to it whenever they wish. This
is a crucial technology for making a project of this
magnitude manageable. Moreover, this knowledge base can
remain alive and growing even after project termination.
COST
The seed cost range is $10,000 - $20,000 to cover
out-of-pocket expenses only: fax/telephone, postage, duplication/
printing, clerical/student assistance, supplies, travel, etc..
Although it would be desirable to make provision for modest
honoraria for Project Team professional services, the scarcity of
funds implies a project policy that all such services will have
to be pro bono.
Sample numbers: 300 hours of clerical/student time at $15/hr,
400 toll-call interviews @ $10/ea, postage for one mailing to
1000 non-INFORMS people, 1000 faxes at $2/each, and $2,000 for
duplication/supplies comes to $13,000 even before travel
(which will, for the most part, have to piggyback on regular
personal and professional travel).
The Roundtable will be asked to guarantee half of the seed
cost by voluntary member donations (cash or services), backed by
its general treasury.
The INFORMS Board will be asked guarantee the other half of
the seed cost, some of it possibly in the form of Business Office
clerical assistance between peak load times.
Failure of either INFORMS or the Roundtable to shoulder half
the seed cost probably would result in a withdrawal of this
proposal.
An INFORMS-wide appeal for contributions will be made once
seed funding is secure. Proceeds will be used to supplement the
seed budget for out-of-pocket expenses and possibly also for
specialized coordination services. The appeal will include
academic departments, which stand to gain much from a successful
project. ACORD (mentioned earlier) will be asked to orchestrate
university contributions.
SCHEDULE
8/95 Form a Pre-Steering Committee to draft Project Plan
Guidelines and plan the joint Roundtable/INFORMS Board meeting
in New Orleans.
Members (alphabetical): Tom Baker, Burnell Brown, Art
Geoffrion, Sid Hess, Mark Lembersky, Randy Robinson, Leon
Schwartz, and Tom Spencer. All agreed to serve.
10/95 New Orleans INFORMS Conference The Pre-Steering
Committee leads the joint Roundtable/INFORMS Board meeting.
Meeting purpose: 1) improve the 10/20/95 Draft Project Plan
Guidelines, including a possible major reduction of scope;
2) authorize the proposed project as modified and guarantee
funding; and 3) appoint an official Steering Committee to
finalize the Project Plan and supervise the project.
Steering Committee to be composed mostly of representatives
from both INFORMS and the Roundtable, with the weight
heavily toward the Roundtable because the Board already has
much to do and the Roundtable has focused traditionally on
practitioners.
Suggested Members: Begin with the Pre-Steering Committee
minus the outgoing VP-Practice, with most people given
the option to withdraw because of the project's
considerable work requirements. (Every Steering
Committee member will need to be actively involved.)
However, INFORMS' incoming VP-Practice and Randy
Robinson need to stay because of their key roles. Add
Terry Harrison, who runs Practice Online and is a strong
supporter of this initiative. The INFORMS Board is
invited to consider assigning one or two pertinent
Directors-at-Large to the Steering Committee, preferably
the ones charged with membership and outreach
responsibility. ACORD should be invited to contribute a
member. Consider adding others on the basis of ability
and willingness to contribute.
12/95 The Steering Committee releases the final Project
Plan with official approval from both INFORMS and the
Roundtable, and begins seeking and screening volunteer Project
Teams. Release is through OR/MS Today and all pertinent
Internet outlets (Email reflectors, news groups, and web
sites). Screening and approval will occur continuously
through 4/96. Accepted Project Teams will be encouraged to
commence work immediately, and to make their project data
available in the on-line knowledge base as early as possible.
The Steering Committee commences to coordinate across (but
not within) Project Teams, disburse available funds, and
monitor Project Plan execution. Great reliance is placed on
Project Team autonomy, on the on-line knowledge base, and on
editorial staffs and reviewers to keep the Committee's
workload reasonable.
5/96 Washington INFORMS Conference As many members of the
Project Teams (by now fully selected) as possible meet with the
Steering Committee and with each other to coordinate and refine
the Project Plan. Commonality of framework and consistency of
approach will be pursued, but not to the point that these
become obstacles. Take advantage of this occasion to do data
gathering among conference attendees and among non-Roundtable
organizations in the Washington area.
8/96 Project Teams all make written progress reports to the
Steering Committee, which offers constructive feedback and
suggests mid-course Project Plan corrections as needed. Teams
submit all available project data in electronic form suitable
for on-line access, a task that has been optional until this
point. Notwithstanding this milestone, the Steering Committee
continues to coordinate the Project Teams thereafter.
11/96 Atlanta INFORMS Conference Project Teams present to
the Steering Committee their respective preliminary findings,
typically segment-specific, and action recommendations for
practitioners, INFORMS Board, and the Roundtable; outline of
results submitted 3-4 weeks prior, so that feedback/
discussion/action items can be prepared. Steering Committee
then presents distilled preliminary findings and
recommendations to the Roundtable and the INFORMS Board, with
assistance by invitation only from the Project Teams. INFORMS
Board and the Roundtable take whatever actions they deem
appropriate.
3/97 Project Teams finalize their respective findings and
recommendations, typically segment-specific, and submit these
to Steering Committee together with all as-yet-unsubmitted
project data in electronic form suitable for on-line access.
5/97 San Diego INFORMS Conference Steering Committee, with
assistance by invitation only from the Project Teams, presents
final project findings and action recommendations to a special
open session at this Conference, with time set aside for
audience feedback and discussion. Steering Committee works
with INFORMS officers and Roundtable Executive Committee on
action items. INFORMS Board and Roundtable take whatever
actions they deem appropriate.
Later Project Teams are encouraged to make versions of
their respective results available for publication in OR/MS
Today, Interfaces, ITORMS, and other suitable outlets.
Steering Committee will seek to facilitate such activities via
prior arrangements with the editors.
SOME PARTICULARS
Coordination with New INFORMS Efforts Increasing the number
of its members has recently become one of INFORMS' most urgent
priorities. By far the easiest way to do this is to seek new
practitioner members, since only a tiny fraction of all OR/MS
practitioners (perhaps on the order of one tenth) so far has
elected to join INFORMS. The Marketing Strategy Committee and
Membership Committee want to do a survey. Very likely the
next Marketing Director also will want to do surveys.
Diligent coordination can produce a great deal of synergy
between such efforts and this project.
Definition of Practitioner The project needs to define the
term "practitioner". One possibility: anyone knowledgeable
about OR/MS who derives a significant part of their livelihood
outside of academia by building or using models. Another
possibility would be to let people self-identify.
Communications As mentioned, great reliance will be placed
on Email reflectors, and to some extent also on the web and
discussion groups on USENET and the popular on-line services,
for data acquisition and key-question dialog with
practitioners and their clients. This has the advantage of
being essentially free, speedy, easy, and of leaving a written
record that can be edited, copied, searched, and made
available on-line for anyone to access. However, there are
practitioners and clients who are not yet on the Internet,
although we suspect that Aol, CompuServe, and Prodigy have by
now brought Internet access to most professionals who don't
have access at work. It will therefore be necessary to use
fax and phone to contact these people when personal interviews
are not practical. This will cost money.
A project 800 number for half a year or so might produce
savings.
Communications subsidies should be sought from phone
companies (e.g., AT&T, GTE, and Pacific Bell are Roundtable
members).
The phone should not be viewed as an undesirable substitute
for Internet communication. In fact, for some purposes, a
good case can be made for exactly the opposite viewpoint;
the personal touch and greater interactivity can elicit
comments and details that would not otherwise emerge.
Project Teams will need to share their experiences in this
regard early in the project.
There is an experimental Internet service that sends faxes
for free through participating sites. The basic idea is to
use the Internet for long haul, and then to make final
delivery via a local or nearly-local call.
Data Sources Phase 2 of the project
requires marshalling already existing data and knowledge
pertaining to the key questions. This work should begin very
early in the project. Existing data sources include:
Commerce Dept., including the famous BLS estimates
concerning the population of "Operations Research Analysts"
Archives of practitioners' messages to OR-related Email
reflectors and USENET news groups (usually these can be
identified easily from their originating Email addresses),
subscription rosters for Email reflectors, and access logs
for OR-related gopher sites and Web pages; this is also a
good way to find practitioners who are on-line
Recruiting firms with OR/MS-related practices
The practitioner membership history of ORSA and TIMS as
reflected in past membership directories (request machine-
readable versions); look for non-INFORMS members in INFORMS
journal subscription lists
Past ORSA and TIMS membership surveys (at least 9 in the
last decade, with more in the offing); cull the
practitioner responses
Published literature and data collected by past studies of
OR/MS practice; the most recent such study is the important
project sponsored by the U.K.'s Operational Research
Society, which briefed the Roundtable earlier this year:
see Ranyard et al. (1995) and the comprehensive literature
review by Fildes and Ranyard (1995)
INFORMS people knowledgeable about aspects of the practice
community; for example, Doug Samuelson is reported to be
familiar with how the BLS develops its statistics, and
Arnold Reisman has studied extensively how OR/MS
publications and academic curricula are frequently
misaligned with the methods practitioners actually use
Edelman competition papers and archives
Personal contacts with former Roundtable representatives at
companies which are no longer Roundtable members (usually
due to internal troubles)
University-initiated surveys like the one now being done by
AT&T (which has a group that is expert in doing surveys and
focus groups) for New Jersey Institute of Technology;
alumni surveys done by academic OR/MS programs (perhaps
this project will stimulate new ones that probe some of the
project's key questions)
Studies done by neighboring professional associations
Archives of the Roundtable's 1986 "Problems and
Opportunities" report to TIMS Council (also a possible
source of additional key questions)
Enclosures in OR/MS Today and in the registration packets at
the 5/96 Washington INFORMS Conference would be an
economical way to obtain data from (mostly) inside the
INFORMS community; if permission can be obtained, enclosures
in magazines of related professional associations would be
an economical way to obtain data outside the INFORMS orbit.
Can such an ambitious project succeed? Can the OR/MS
practitioner community really be mapped by the coordinated efforts
of many small teams? Surely this task is far simpler in most
respects than mapping the human genome. I leave you with the
following food for thought:
"The Human Genome Project has often been compared with World
War II's Manhattan Project in its ambition and scope. Yet,
unlike the Manhattan Project ... the Human Genome Project is
almost completely decentralized. The funding agencies have
parceled out tiny pieces of the project to scores of
research teams scattered around the world.
In spite of this decentralization, which you might naturally
suspect would be a barrier to effective collaboration and
lead to fragmented, duplicated efforts, the Human Genome
Project is ahead of schedule and under budget. How is this
possible? The data each research team generates is
electronically submitted over the Internet to one of many
specialized databases ... the data is then linked to related
data in the same and other databases, and it's made
available almost immediately to the entire genome research
community via Web servers that are universally accessible on
the Internet." (Duncan 1995)
REFERENCES
Corbett, C., W. Overmeer and L. Van Wassenhove, "Strands of
Practice in OR," Working Paper 95/44/TM, 5 May 1995, INSEAD,
Fountainebleau, France.
Duncan, R., "Publishing Databases on the World-Wide Web,"
PC Magazine, August 1995, pp. 403-412.
Fildes, R. and J. Ranyard, "Success and Survival of OR Groups:
A Review," Dept. of Management Science, Lancaster Univ., 1995.
Ranyard, J., W. Crymble and R. Fildes, "Factors Influencing
the Success of OR Groups - A Progress Report (June 1995)," to
appear in ORS Newsletter. Sent to all Roundtable
members in mid-September. Final report in transit.
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