OR/MS Today - December 1998

December 1998

Getting the Word Out

By Michael Trick

As editor of INFORMS Online (http://www.informs.org), I get five to 10 messages a day along the lines of "Can you please send me the conference presentation TE42.3 How Optimizing Supply Chains Made My Company Rich"? Many of my associate editors receive a similar number. Now I am sure that most INFORMS members know that our semi-annual meetings do not have published proceedings, and that there is no formal necessity to even have a paper to go with a presentation (though I, for one, am always disappointed to see a presentation that has no supporting paper). Therefore, I reply to these inquiries by saying they must contact the authors directly for a paper (if any exists). In fact, my mail program has a single keystroke for me to reply in that fashion.

After responding to perhaps 1,000 of these inquiries, the question arises as to who these people are, and what do these questions tell us (and why can't they read the instructions on the pages to go straight to the authors, but that is another topic)? First, it is clear that the majority of these people are not (yet) INFORMS members. My favorite statistic about INFORMS usage is that we get more different people at the site per week than there are members of INFORMS (14,000 different machines went to IOL last week, compared with roughly 12,000 members). Since April, 250,000 different machines have visited IOL at least once. Either every INFORMS member uses 20 different machines to access IOL, or there are many, many non-members who have found our corner of the Internet. Search engines and other sites on the Internet do a great job of funneling people to our site. Every day, more than 30 people get to the INFORMS site after doing a search on the phrase "Supply chain management." These are people who may not know of INFORMS, or even of operations research/management science, but they are interested in what we do.

How can we help these people learn more about our activities? After all, it is in all of our interests that the world at large knows what we do. For OR/MS practitioners, these people represent potential customers or clients. For academics, these people are potential students, executive education recipients or consulting contacts. For students, these people are prospective employers. If we would like people to know what we are doing, we need members to do the following:

Get a Web page together, and put it in your membership profile (and make certain the entry in your profile is correct). People will find your Web page either by our list of Web pages (http://www.informs.org/Dir/weblist.html) or through our online membership directory (http://www.informs.org/Dir/Dir.html).
Put your presentations online at the OR/MS presentation database (http://www.informs.org/Presentation). This rapidly expanding resource, compiled by Oklahoma State's Ramesh Sharda, will even provide conversion services for practitioners.
Put your working papers online (http://www.informs.org/WorkingPapers). This new service provides an organized and searchable classification of working papers in OR/MS.
Provide Web addresses for your presentations. In addition to the presentation database, you can provide pointers to your papers/presentations right in the online conference bulletin. Simply fill out the Web address when you submit your abstract, or use our simple form to add it after you have the paper submitted.
Let people know that you are an INFORMS member, and let people know about IOL. In fact, if you put the following line at the bottom of your page (<br><A HREF="http://www.informs.org/"><IMG SRC="http://www.informs.org/images/informsl.gif" BORDER=0></A> INFORMS Member <br>) then a nice INFORMS logo will appear on your page (the logo may change, but it will remain roughly the same size and shape) to let others know you are a member, and others can reach IOL simply by clicking on the logo.

Changes in the editorial board

There have been a few changes in the INFORMS Online Editorial Board. First, Brian Borchers of New Mexico Tech has been named IOL's first deputy editor. As IOL has grown, the need for a deputy editor has become clear, and Borchers' three years of experience as associate editor (first for Membership, then for Technical Service) made him an ideal candidate.

The INFORMS membership decided to elect Associate Editor (Conferences) Matt Saltzman as vice president/Information Technology. What is good for INFORMS is not as good for INFORMS Online, since Saltzman will be leaving the editorial board to concentrate on broader information technology issues.

Finally, the board says good-bye to Art Geoffrion, our informal associate editor for the past three years. Geoffrion (president-elect, president and past-president, 1996-98 of INFORMS) has been instrumental in many of the changes and additions to IOL. He provided committee pages, sister-society pages, aspects of the "new look" for IOL, and countless other changes and suggestions. Perhaps his biggest accomplishment is getting the Student Union going (http://www.informs.org/student_union). Of course, Geoffrion will still be around, but his absence from the board is a good time to acknowledge all of his hard work.

New at IOL

IOL has a new look, including a snappy javascript navigation device on all pages (which turns into a regular navigation form for browser's without javascript). To see how we do that, check out Inquiry.com's "Ask the JavaScript Pro" (http://www.inquiry.com/techtips/js_pro/).

We are also experimenting with some alternatives for putting up material on the web. INFORMS Progress (http://www.informs.org/General/Newsletter) is now up in Adobe's pdf format.

Michael Trick of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, is editor of INFORMS Online.

Table of Contents

OR/MS Today Home Page

Lionheart Publishing, Inc.
506 Roswell Street, Suite 220, Marietta, GA 30060, USA
Phone: 770-431-0867 | Fax: 770-432-6969
E-mail: lpi@lionhrtpub.com
URL: http://www.lionhrtpub.com