OR/MS Today - June 1999 - Was It Something I Said?

June 1999

OR & IS: Scenes from a Marriage

By Vijay Mehrotra

Scene 1: It was my first project as a full-fledged management consultant. Dissertation completed, I had joined an exciting consulting firm and had promptly been assigned to a team that was building a logistics management system for a global shipping network. From the beginning, we worked very closely with the client's information systems department to implement the system. These guys were not like us. They were located across the country, had all been working in their current group for years, hadn't been to graduate school, hadn't studied network flows, didn't spontaneously jump to the whiteboard to create ad-hoc illustrations. But they were genuinely nice people, and we all managed to get along reasonably well.

A few months into the project, the whole team gathered at our offices in California for several days of meetings. One day, I took a walk with one of the client's IS managers after lunch. We were enjoying the sunshine and chatting about the upcoming baseball season when, out of the blue, he turned to me and said, in a chummy, conspiratorial tone, "How's the job market out here for people in, you know, our profession?" Caught off guard, all of those years of improv training totally failed me. "Our profession?" I stammered weakly, unable to mask my confusion and perhaps my contempt.

The guys on my project team — hoary veterans of the OR programs at Stanford and MIT, respectively — howled with laughter when I told them about this conversation.

Scene 2: The young engineer, who had just joined our consulting staff a few months earlier, had just returned from a customer site. His mission there was to teach the clients to use the scheduling software and to educate them on the specifics of the model that we had built for them. When asked about the trip, he was visibly upset. "Look, they didn't want us, they wanted an IT consultant. They had problems with their network, with their database, with their installation of our software. That's not what I do." Unable to learn to effectively establish an agenda with unfocused customers or to appreciate the value that he was truly adding, he resigned from his position a few weeks later, moving on to a job in scientific application development.

As you may have guessed, my subject this month is the interaction of industry professionals in operations research with information systems (IS), information technology (IT), or one of the myriad of other titles that corporate computing falls under.

In the past, there has been plenty of friction. We pedigreed mathematical hotshots have been quick to look down on and to complain about the "systems people," one minute chuckling to one another about their foibles and the next minute raging about their failures in supplying us with what we so obviously need. We have a mental image of them that is similar to the well-known character from Seinfeld who stands proud and tall behind the counter and indiscriminately declares, "No soup for you!"

For their part, IS professionals have as a group not been a very user-friendly crowd to work with. Ironically, the common complaints about them — that they speak in technobabble, don't understand the real business issues, and are lost in their own little world — are similar to what has often been said about us.

Like it or not, however, we are stuck with one another. And indeed we INFORMS types better wake up to the fact that we now need to pay more attention to IT than ever.

First the obvious stuff: We OR people who are responsible for imagining, defining, developing, testing and implementing mathematical models are highly dependent on IT departments. Their responsibilities include not only the computing machines we work on, but also the software systems that gather the data our models depend on, the databases that store our inputs, the desktops of our internal customers (in sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing, logistics, pricing or wherever), and the networks (including the increasingly important corporate Web sites) that hold all of this together. With users of our work more widely distributed than ever, we are basically not able to make an impact without some cooperation and support from IS.

But there is another level to be aware of. Over the past few years, there has been a confluence of factors (the growth of the service sector, the blurring of the lines between products and services, the critical role of systems in the successful delivery of services, the dramatic growth in desktop computing power, the potential for a paradigm shift driven by the Internet) that is forcing the corporate leaders to pay more attention and give more respect than ever to their information systems. The result is that the CIO (and ubiquitous and powerful IS consultants such as Andersen and EDS) are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the corporate agenda.

What does this mean for the INFORMS community? First and foremost, we must build bridges to IS people and keep them interested in what we are doing and why it is valuable. Moreover, they need to understand that we can make them heroes by using our capabilities to help create "smarter" systems with more bottomline impact. Our goal is for senior IS professionals to become advocates and advertising channels for our work.

This channel should also be two-way, for senior IS people have a unique perspective on where current systems and practices fall short. Once we establish some trust, they can often offer ideas and articulate needs and requirements at a much more tangible level than we can. And when they feel like they have something invested in us, they are much more likely to help us convince still skeptical senior management about the value of our proposed projects. That's when we've got a shot at a real partnership.

We have to work together every day anyway. There is no getting around that.

Vijay Mehrotra is the CEO of Onward Inc., an operations management consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif. He holds a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University. He can be reached via e-mail at vijay@onward-net.com.

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