OR/MS Today - June 1999

June 1999

Putting Oil in the Lamp

By Thomas Magnanti
magnanti@mit.edu

To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.
— Mother Teresa

I have always been attracted to INFORMS for two reasons: it provides me with valued resources, especially journals, meetings and networking opportunities, and it is the organization that represents my profession. How does INFORMS see itself? And, how is it attempting to ensure that it will continue to serve our interests? In this article, I'd like to address these questions.

Let's start with INFORMS' mission and vision.

Mission: INFORMS represents professionals in the fields of operations research and the management sciences (OR/MS), and in related fields such as information technology. Members of the OR/MS profession apply scientific tools and methods to improve systems and operations and to assist in managerial decision-making. OR/MS is a discipline that integrates and extends the principles and techniques of engineering, mathematics and the physical, information and social sciences.

INFORMS is dedicated to advancing the development and dissemination of all aspects of OR/MS.

Vision: INFORMS will advance the practice, research, methods and applications of OR/MS by:

Encouraging, facilitating and rewarding excellence.
Communicating every aspect of OR/MS to all appropriate audiences through journals, conferences, magazines, the Internet and other appropriate media.
Promoting the achievements and capabilities of OR/MS professionals to managers and executives, policy makers and the general public.
Providing life-long education and career development opportunities to OR/MS professionals.
Attracting the best people to the field of OR/MS and attracting those in the field to INFORMS.

Building upon this mission and vision, over the past several months, led by President-Elect John Birge, the INFORMS Board has been devoting much of its time to strategic planning. As part of this exercise, the Board has formulated the following overarching goals for INFORMS:

To be the information resource for OR/MS consumers.
To enhance the value of INFORMS membership for current members.
To enhance connections between OR/MS practitioners and academics, and to enhance the value of INFORMS meetings for practitioners.
To increase membership of the like-minded, attracting members from closely related fields such as applied mathematics, computer science or the information sciences.
To increase excitement for OR/MS, mathematics and science among secondary education students and to increase the pipeline of under-represented groups into OR/MS.
To create value from OR/MS to senior executives and policy makers.
To increase the worldwide adoptions of INFORMS journals.
To increase the value of OR/MS publications for both authors and readers.

New Initiatives: To help meet some of these objectives, during the past year INFORMS has undertaken several important initiatives:

Restructuring its meetings, moving toward a single annual meeting complemented by a number of special-interest meetings including a new practice meeting in 2001.
Initiating electronic publications. As of this summer, all INFORMS journals will be available online and members will be able to subscribe to all INFORMS journals electronically as a bundle at a price significantly less than individual subscriptions.
Introducing a new electronic publication on education that will begin publishing later this year.
Offering a workshop on teaching effectiveness at our annual meetings, beginning with the recently held meeting in Cincinnati.
Initiating, again at the Cincinnati meeting, a graduate student consortium on Placement in Industry, Business and Consulting to complement INFORMS' long-standing and successful annual doctoral colloquium.
Using an online preliminary program in place of the usual printed program for the Cincinnati meeting to reduce lead times and present an improved, more timely program. This initiative represents one of several potential initiatives for creating new, and hopefully improved, ways to do business.

Targeted Initiatives: To help in further meeting the overarching goals that it has articulated, the Board has also recently identified the following attractive initiatives that, resources permitting, INFORMS might undertake in the months ahead:

Create topical special pages for IOL, for example, Web pages on supply chain management or on e-commerce.
Create a richer database of members and institutions so that INFORMS can provide better service to its members and better market its products, for example, one that would permit the society to map members and institutions to libraries to better promote journals.
Create a plan to market OR/MS careers to undergraduate students in related areas of study (e.g., mathematics, physics) including custom Web pages for the students and links from related area Web pages to IOL.
Re-engineer some of its operations to achieve improved efficiencies, for example, use the Web to significantly reduce data handling in the business office.
Continue to invest in IOL as a major source of innovation, for example, by reviewing and improving its overall design.
Design bundles of journals with appropriate pricing.
Reduce the turnaround time for journal article reviews.

I take away two significant messages from this discussion. First, the Web and IOL have increasingly become central to INFORMS' identity and its operations as a professional and scientific organization. Second, INFORMS continues to pursue opportunities to better serve its members and the OR/MS profession at large. INFORMS is, indeed, continuing to put oil in the lamp to keep it burning.

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