Recent articles in the press examine the INFORMS annual meeting and the contributions made by operations researchers. Following are excerpts from selected articles and interviews.

From Optimize! magazine, January 2003 (The article was written by INFORMS Past President Michael Trick):

When Continental Airlines needs to reschedule planes due to a snowstorm in Chicago, IT has no problem telling company officials where each of their thousands of planes and crews are. But the systems can't tell airline executives how to get back on schedule as quickly as possible. When advertisers call television network NBC, sales execs know which time slots are available, but they can't identify the best package of spots to reach the advertiser's target audience. This is when Continental and NBC bring out the heavy ammo — operations research. Both companies are using OR to find the optimum solution to these common but complex business challenges.

Companies make huge IT investments to link their far-flung activities. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer-relationship management, and supply-chain systems provide up-to-the-minute data on enterprise operations. But making informed business decisions based on that data requires further analysis. More important, in an age of narrow margins and fierce competition, CEOs are asking how their companies can achieve the best possible outcomes.

Ten years ago, optimal decision-making was not feasible for most companies; the scarcity of data and the high cost of computing made business optimization possible only for the largest companies. Now, the increased availability of high-quality data through enterprise applications has brought optimization within reach of most organizations. The key to making optimal decisions is to exploit recent OR advances.

From NPR Weekend "All Things Considered," Jan. 4, 2003 (Homeland security was the subject in the following excerpt from a National Public Radio interview with Professor Paul Stockton of the Naval Postgraduate School.):

NPR: So you're going to produce people with the equivalent of a master's degree or Ph.D. in homeland security?

Stockton: They'll get a master's degree in security studies with a specialization in homeland security. And the reason that we're doing that, Steve, is that homeland security does not exist as an academic field. We're having to define the field of homeland security as part of the intellectual challenge of building the future leadership for homeland security for the nation.

NPR: What kind of questions require academic study here?

Stockton: Well, let me give you an example. One of the things that we're going to be focusing on here is the challenge of critical infrastructure protection. States and localities and, indeed, private industry and the federal government across the nation face the problem of figuring out where should our scarce resources go in order to protect critical infrastructure. There's a lot of operations research analysis that can be brought to bear on the question of: Where do we get the most bang for our buck in protecting critical infrastructures?

From the Arizona Republic, Dec. 24, 2002:

According to a recent study in a journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, research and development spending intended to generate innovative new products is strongest at corporations whose CEOs are younger, invest heavily in their own firms' stock, and have experience in marketing, engineering or R&D.

In contrast, firms led by CEOs who are attorneys or approaching retirement spend much more conservatively on research projects, whose success cannot be guaranteed and whose failure can be pricey.

Barry List is the director of Public Relations at INFORMS.



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