I figured this out only recently. I was in the museum in the lovely little town of Totnes in western England. The top floor of the museum houses the "Babbage Room" to honor Charles Babbage (1791-1871). Most of us have heard about Babbage's work designing the "difference engine" to automatically compute tables and other series and later the "analytical engine," a programmable computer with Lady Ada (Byron) Lovelace as the first programmer.

What is less known is that Babbage can be regarded as the first operations researcher. Indeed some call him the "father of operations research." He researched operations in the pin-making and the printing industry. More importantly, he studied the sorting, pricing and transportation operations in the postal industry, and his work led Sir Rowland Hill to introduce "Penny Post" to all of England (Figure 1). By the way, I should say "operational research" in keeping with Mark Twain's quip about England and the United States being two nations divided by a common language, but, atypically for the United Kingdom, the Totnes museum uses the term operations research.

Figure 1: Part of a poster about Charles Babbage's contribution to "operations research" in the Babbage Room of the Totnes Museum, Totnes (England), July 2007. The portrait is that of Sir Rowland Hill.

Assuming Babbage's work as a starting point, where did we deviate from operations, or did we never really start there? I can't imagine any O.R. academic, pre- or post-tenure, from a research university touching the pin or printing or indeed any other industry with a 10-foot pin or pole in attempting to publish in a top-tier journal.

There's no lack of researchable issues in operations if you look at industry concerns or the growing profits of consultancies. One reason these don't appear in top-tier journals could be a strict notion of what is publishable and the growing relevance of economic theory. Modeling (axioms, lemmas and theorems) requires showing some Nash equilibria in a supply chain while empirical work requires the use of a particular "fancy" statistical technique, e.g., structural equation modeling (although that is passé now, I hear), regardless of how boring or unexciting the results of the analysis about the "economic structure" of the industry, etc.

True, economics underlies everything a company does — its positioning in the market place, its efforts to reduce supply chain costs, its efforts to hire the best people — but do we have to demonstrate that tie in every paper we write? Economics dictates we need to design safer and more fuel-efficient cars, but do we need to bring in Nash equilibria in a paper on greater fuel-efficiency?

I think this is where practice breaks from academia; practice requires focus on the problem at hand in detail without necessarily recourse to any "theory" while academic publication requires abstraction away from the problem to bring in some economic theory (but sometimes boiling down to daunting mathematics or statistics). Neither approach may be a contribution to knowledge about operations.

What this means that research in operations — dare I call it "operations research"? — is a wide-open field. Anyone interested?



ManMohan S. Sodhi (M.Sodhi@city.ac.uk) heads the operations research group at Cass Business School in London.

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