October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5
October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5
As one of my last duties as President of CPMS, it is a pleasure for me to announce the new Practitioner's Page, sponsored by the College on the Practice of Management Science (CPMS). We want to have a forum focusing on the needs and interests of practice and practitioners; this page will be loaded with news, ideas, articles and editorials which are useful, informative and fun for those practicing operations research. Our hope is that it will complement Interfaces and enrich OR/MS Today. Eventually, depending on readers' interests and the material we get, we may expand it into a separate newsletter.
It is with even greater pleasure that I introduce Doug Samuelson as our first editor. Most of you know Doug from his "ORacle" columns. He brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the job of guiding the evolution of our page, or department, or newsletter or whatever this turns out to be. But no matter how competent Doug is, to be successful, he needs the help of all of us. Please send your ideas, news, information, articles and suggestions to Doug so that we can start creating a dynamic and interesting forum for OR/MS practice.
I want to thank OR/MS Today for adding this department so that we can reach the full INFORMS membership. We hope that by doing this we can increase the membership and participation in CPMS. This will enhance our ability to create dynamic, useful and interesting programs for the practice community. Although I have been emphasizing practice in my comments, it is important to point out that CPMS and the Practitioners' Page are not meant just for practitioners, but for the academic community as well. We want CPMS and this page to be a forum where practitioners can learn of useful new tools and techniques, academics can learn of useful applications, and the two communities can enrich and support each other.
In the same spirit, let me point out that everyone benefits from a strong CPMS and a good set of services for OR/MS practitioners. CPMS' ability to support activities like this depends on membership, attendance at CPMS-sponsored sessions and the Edelman Prize competition, and other support for CPMS. We have been conducting a membership drive for CPMS during the summer and will continue through the fall. Please join!
&emdash; Tom Spencer
President, CPMS
tspencer@attmail.com
Welcome to the Practitioners' Page! We &emdash; INFORMS, CPMS and OR/MS Today &emdash; hope this will become a regular feature, serving the practitioner community and those who work with it. We'll provide news items and notices, but mostly we want to provide a forum for useful and entertaining material you won't see anywhere else. We will trade good suggestions and good stories, preferably with lessons learned, none of which would qualify for Interfaces or feature articles in OR/MS Today. Send me your stories of dragons not quite slain, moats not quite crossed, and maidens not quite rescued &emdash; or "rescued" from situations they turned out not to mind!
Here's one of my own favorite stories from this category. In 1981-82, I worked for a federal agency I will not name, since I still have some dealings with them. We were a policy analysis shop, where writing quickly was essential. Most of my colleagues were content to draft in longhand; I was not, having switched gratefully to a typewriter when I was in high school many years earlier.
The secretaries all had nice new Wang word processors. I noticed that they had a coordinated schedule of breaks so that the phones were always covered; to this I applied my OR/MS skills. I obtained their schedule, persuaded them that my typing at their stations while they were on break would do no harm, and proceeded to "float" around the office with my diskette.
My boss didn't like this at all. He informed me that I was interfering with the secretaries' productivity, no matter what I thought. Also, I was blurring the distinction between professionals and support staff, thereby lowering people's esteem for our entire group. (It probably didn't help that most of the professionals were men, all the secretaries were women, and this guy was a Grade A male chauvinist.) Clever solution be hanged, I was messing up tradition!
What makes this really funny is that the boss had a second career. He was being flown all over the country by the World Future Society to give invited speeches on, among other things, "The Future of the American Workplace"!
&emdash; Doug Samuelson
dsamuel@seas.gwu.edu
CPMS will hold its Manager's Forum on Saturday, Nov. 2 just prior to the INFORMS meeting in Atlanta. The Forum is limited to 30 participants and will address a broad spectrum of current issues. Previous forum topics have included project management, commercializing, OR/MS products, selling and pricing services, software and technology advances, and various aspects of career development. Registration includes a welcoming reception Friday evening, Nov. 1, plus continental breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday.
For registration questions, call the INFORMS Rhode Island Business Office, 1-800-343-0062; for program questions, contact G. Jack Theurer, chairman, phone: (212) 787-1975, fax: (212) 874-9109, E-mail: theurer@aol.com.
CPMS will sponsor a keynote session featuring the South African Defense Force, the 1996 Franz Edelman Prize Winner, at the INFORMS meeting in Atlanta on Sunday, Nov.3, at 6:15 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom East. Here is your chance to see a top-flight presentation of the best practical problem-solving work in OR/MS, without having to come a day early or pay an extra registration fee. A question-and-answer session will follow.
The elected officers of CPMS for the term Sept. 1, 1996, to Aug.
31, 1997, are: Howard Finkelberg, Chair; Amir Sadrian, Vice Chair;
Yoshiro Ikura, Secretary; Robert R. Love Jr., Treasurer.
OR/MS Today copyright © 1996 by the Institute
for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights
reserved.