OR/MS Today - June 2000 - INFORMS Online

June 2000

INFORMS Online

Something for Everyone, Even Execs

By Michael A. Trick

For its five-plus years of existence, INFORMS Online (www.informs.org) has concentrated on advertising the online activities of INFORMS, its subdivisions and its vast array of committees, task forces and other groups. For the most part, we have designed IOL for the members of INFORMS and others deeply involved in operations research. Our conference pages make it easy to find talks on the latest research results; our journal pages (through INFORMS PubsOnline) give the table of contents, abstracts and (to subscribers) full text of our journals; our membership directory makes it easy to find e-mail addresses of our colleagues.

But even a cursory look at our log files makes it clear that our audience is much broader than the INFORMS membership or even the most optimistic measure of OR specialists. Every week, more than 15,000 different people (or, to be accurate, different machines) access IOL, with more than 250,000 since the start of 2000. This number dwarfs the 12,000-person membership of IOL or even the 1998 estimate by the U.S. Department of Labor of 76,000 OR analysts. Who are these people, and why are they visiting us?

One group of people who visit us is business executives. Now it is certainly true that some OR people are business executives themselves. In fact, the recent explosion of companies involved in such issues as supply chain optimization, logistics, yield management and other e-commerce issues are led, in many cases, by OR people. But there is another group of executives that I want to talk about. These executives may have heard a bit about what OR can do, and may even have managerial control over OR people, but they have not been educated in the field and may have only basic knowledge of the area. Let's call these people the OR-curious.

The OR-curious want to learn more about operations research, either to be better managers, to take advantage of OR skills, or to simply understand what their subordinates are doing. They reach IOL through one of the search engines (while rankings change rapidly, IOL generally scores high in search engines), often having searched on fairly complicated technical terms (terms like "kanban" and "e-commerce auctions" occur surprising often). But once we attract them, do the OR-curious stay? Are there items online suitable for non-specialists?

Absolutely! Let me highlight some of the most useful areas for the OR-curious. Like many professional organizations with an academic component, our best work appears in journals. Fortunately, INFORMS has two publication outlets that are ideal for non-specialists. The first is our practice-oriented journal Interfaces (see Interfaces Online at www.informs.org/interfaces). Terry Harrison, the editor of Interfaces, has worked hard to put back issues of Interfaces online. Now, as most members know but outsiders do not, Interfaces prides itself on readability, and the articles in this journal provide an outstanding introduction to the practice of OR.

While preparing this column, I visited Interfaces Online, clicked on an issue from a few years ago, and passed an hour reading (in most cases re-reading) a number of fascinating and well-written articles. My experience in the class I teach in the MBA program here shows that sufficiently motivated non-specialists can read Interfaces papers and learn much from them. Interfaces Online is also the home for the Edelman Prize Competition papers. The Edelman Prize is the most prestigious prize available on the practice of management science and operations research. The resulting papers are a treasure mine of information about what we do.

The second print outlet suitable for the OR-curious is not a journal per se, but it is the magazine you are reading: OR/MS Today (www.lionhrtpub.com/ORMS.shtml). OR/MS Today features highly readable articles on the range of activities in the field. It also publishes a large number of software surveys and other guides extremely relevant to the OR-curious. For instance, their 2000 OR/MS Today Resource Directory (www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/RD/RD-intro.html) is a comprehensive guide to software, vendors and publishers in the field.

Another reason the OR-curious might visit IOL is to find courses in the area. Continuing education courses in OR are proliferating, and IOL together with the Continuing Education Committee of INFORMS has a list of many of them (www.informs.org/CE).

There are many other pages available through IOL that are useful for the OR-curious. INFORMS' Director of Public Relations Barry List periodically puts out press releases on the most intriguing work from our journals and conferences (www.informs.org/Press). These are snapshots of top quality work, made suitable for cocktail party discussions.

Our job services, including the Professional Opportunities page (www.informs.org/Jobs) and our Job Placement Service (www.informs.org/JPS), address perhaps the most critical problem many executives face: How can I find well-qualified people to fill critical roles in the company? Every job posting is read by more than 1,000 different people, while entries in the Job Placement Service get immediate access to hundreds of resumes of OR specialists.

If you are an executive who is OR-curious, IOL offers a wealth of information: I recommend you check us out. And if you are an OR specialist, might I suggest you change your boss's home page to www.informs.org. By the time it gets changed back, you may have made a convert!

Michael Trick (trick@cmu.edu) is a professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, and the editor of INFORMS Online.

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