"An ability to take advantage of scientific decision-assisting tools provides leaders with important insights at a time when we must make sense of a flood of data," says James C. Bean, President of INFORMS and Associate Dean for Graduate Education, College of Engineering, University of Michigan.
Last week, Northwestern University announced the appointment of Dipak C. Jain as Dean of the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Prof. Jain has a Ph.D. in management science. In 1999, Northwestern named John R. Birge as Dean of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Professor Birge is the immediate past president of INFORMS, the premier operations research and management sciences professional society.
Early this month, the White House nominated two men with degrees in operations research from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey. Thomas E. White has been nominated to be Secretary of the Army and James G. Roche has been nominated as Secretary of the Air Force.
Analytical and operations research ability is evident at other major academic posts. Other leaders with operations research expertise at key universities are —
- Thomas L. Magnanti, Dean of Engineering at MIT and a past president of INFORMS
- Patrick Harker, Dean of the Wharton School and a former editor-in-chief of the INFORMS journal Operations Research
- Kim B. Clark, Dean of Faculty, Harvard Business School
- Jared L, Cohon, President of Carnegie Mellon University
All are INFORMS members.
Productivity Improvement
Operations research specializes in productivity improvement, a notable strength in light of a May 8 Labor Department report which shows that the productivity of American workers has declined for the first time in six years. This comes at a time when the nation is worried about an economic downturn.
Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve Board Governor, recently explained that productivity growth, of all the economic statistics that analysts pore over, is surely the most important in the long run. Productivity alone determines the long-run path of income per capita, or living standards. It plays an important role in controlling inflation. Were national leaders able to pick one economic statistic to be favorable, he said, they would surely pick growth in productivity.
Operations research is unique in its concentration on productivity improvement in all kinds of organizations, and in most functions within an organization. It is the one field that scans all the sciences for useful analytical methods and then applies them to make practical productivity improvements.
While operations research usually operates behind the scenes, we see its results in current managerial trends. Such popular effectiveness improvers as supply chain management, dynamic pricing, optimization, simulation, data mining, and decision-support systems are all a part of OR. Taken together, these techniques - and others! - comprise modern Operations Research (OR).
More than ever, gaining extra productivity from limited resources requires the best available analysis, commented INFORMS President Bean.
"Operations research places the best analysis the world has to offer at the disposal of executives as they confront management challenges" he says. "I am pleased to see its importance recognized through the selection of members of the OR profession for key positions."
An INFORMS conference, "Optimizing the Extended Enterprise in the New Economy" will address the contributions of operations research to productivity growth. It takes place from this Sunday, May 20 to Tuesday, May 22 at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla in San Diego.
The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®) is an international scientific society with over 10,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications. The INFORMS website is at http://www.informs.org.