April 1998 President's Desk: What is in Your OR Toolbox? By Karla Hoffman, khoffman@gmu.edu In this issue, a number of people have described their vision of the profession 50 years from now. Thinking about this topic caused me also to consider where we are today relative to even 25 years ago, and to ask the question of whether we have the tools and training we need to answer today's most pressing business concerns. In olden times - the mid-1970s - one of the most difficult aspects of an OR project was obtaining data. One had two choices: create an expensive data collection effort; or, if the data was available, wait for the MIS department to write the COBOL instructions to retrieve the data from the company's mainframe and put it into a usable format. As a result, projects often took months, if not years, to complete. Typically, they were done for major corporations with big budgets. Today, we are faced with a very different dilemma. Everyone is collecting and storing enormous amounts of data on a daily basis. The question is how to transform the data collected into usable information for quick, informed decision making. We are no longer allowed the luxury of multiyear projects. Businesses must react to the marketplace far too quickly. A product's total lifespan might only be six months! If we are to meaningfully assist in the decision-making process, we must use and develop tools that allow extraordinarily fast computation - tools that provide needed information to the decision maker in hours rather than years. To our credit, OR tools now exist that automatically retrieve information from very large databases, solve extraordinarily large problems and graphically display results of alternative decisions. My question to you is: Do you, and do the people working with you, have the necessary tools and skills to quickly access databases, incorporate the extracted data into large-scale models capable of handling the complexities of today's problems and present the results in graphically appealing ways? Without such tools, can we expect management to use our methods and conclusions? To be more specific: If you are a professor of OR, do you require your students to extract data from large databases (which are likely to be incomplete and inaccurate), move that data directly into large-scale statistical packages for data analysis and data mining, then into an optimization or simulation package capable of handling thousands of alternative situations, and then provide the output in a presentation format understandable to management that details the consequences of a variety of alternatives? If you are a consultant: Do you have a tool box that is sufficient for answering the extraordinarily complicated questions posed to you in a timely manner? For example, does your toolbox include at least one simulation package that allows multiprocessing and video output and links directly to databases? Does your toolbox include a mathematical programming modeling language that automatically takes information out of a database, puts it into an optimizer and automatically performs a sensitivity analysis of alternative decisions in a presentation format to the decision maker? Do you have a mathematical software package, such as MATLAB or Mathematica, that visually displays the results of complex mathematical computations? In essence, are you using state-of-the-art tools for technical computing? If, as teachers, we do not use industrial-grade software, and if, as consultants, we do not have such tools at our fingertips, we are likely to be left behind in this fast-paced, unforgiving business environment. INFORMS can help you stay up to date. As a society, we are considering how we can better provide our members with lifelong learning. We are initiating a task force to examine the question of how best to keep our members up to date technically, and how to alert our members of important events taking place in the business world. If you are interested in helping develop this program, please volunteer to join this important task force. There are many vehicles for providing such continuing education. INFORMS can provide a calendar of short courses available throughout the year from a variety of vendors, with their prices and schedules. We can expand the collection of workshops at our national meetings and make those workshops available regionally. We can expand the vendor software demonstrations at meetings. We can catalog the distance-learning opportunities that universities and companies are developing. We can create web-based short courses and provide them on the IOL home page. Any or all of these avenues are possible. We need to hear from you to learn your most pressing continuing education needs. We also need to know the best mechanism for getting this information to you. Won't you help INFORMS keep you up to date? Please go to the continuing education homepages of INFORMS Online (http://www.informs.org/ContEd/conted.html) and give us your thoughts and suggestions. Table of Contents OR/MS Today Home Page OR/MS Today copyright © 1998 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved. Lionheart Publishing, Inc. 506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969 E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com Web Site © Copyright 1998 by Lionheart Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.