Cyberspace
Supplementing OR Education
By ManMohan S. Sodhi
A cartoon I saw had a philosophy major scratching his head over the examination question of how he would make a living after graduation. Similar questions are asked about OR students sometimes. Perhaps OR should become more "practical," but let us not throw out the core OR baby with the bathwater of poor market perception.
OR students (and working professionals) certainly need to better understand the business process and technology context in order to thrive, but the core subject is not only relevant to the industry — I can say that from personal experience — it is becoming increasingly so. Let us start with a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats (SWOT) analysis for OR:
Strengths: OR is rooted in practice and combines mathematics, computer science and business process information to solve real problems — you can pick up any issue of Operations Research journal from the 1970s to see this.
Weaknesses: There is not much awareness or understanding of OR in industry. The disappearance of OR from the MBA curriculum stems from and contributes to this. Manyworlds (www.manyworlds.com), a good Web site devoted to business strategy, has mathematics for the "innovative" economy comprising real options, game theory, complexity and artificial intelligence, but not OR! The site referred to only one OR-related article [Sodhi, 2001], and that too rated 5-stars by their experts, but I suspect that its inclusion was due to the technology and e-business issues rather than OR.
Opportunities: There is an increasing need for OR. For example, supply-chain planning implementations (e.g., systems from i2, Logility, Manugistics and SAP) require a good understanding of modeling. The Internet and e-commerce also require improved matching or predictive algorithms. Geoffrion and Krishnan [2001] list many such Internet-related opportunities.
Threats: Others fill the need for OR because managers are not aware of OR, marginalizing OR further. For instance, computer scientists implement algorithms even though, unknown to them, there may be better OR algorithms, and ERP consultants implement supply-chain planning systems without modeling considerations.
So what should we do? I have been on both sides of the academia-industry fence. As vice president at Gandiva, a software vendor for managing IT-related processes enterprise-wide, I design OR into the software and design processes (e.g., collaborative planning and impact analysis) for its use. And I have worked as a consultant with Accenture, American Airlines/Sabre and Scient. On the academic side, I have taught at the University of Michigan Business School and currently teach IT and e-business to executives through executive education at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Here are some ideas to supplement OR education
With business context:
Use articles from Interfaces and OR/MS Today. Use articles from technology-related journals such as CIO Magazine, also available online www.cio.com.
Use industry white papers from vendors as well as research groups like Gartner or Forrester to learn technology-related terms such as e-procurement, ERP, CRM and APS. These articles describe business processes associated with Internet-related and other technologies, and may be woven into student projects to understand business processes and to look for OR opportunities.
With technology context:
Make it natural for students to think in terms of using the Web or Internet in designing, implementing and using algorithms. Give students projects on discovering how Web-based decision-support systems work or could work, starting with Web-based calculators. They could use NEOS (http://neos.mcs.anl.gov) for linear programming problems.
You could direct algorithmic research towards distributed or even architecture-free algorithms to better prepare students for the present and future. Ensure that the students have programming skills; Java is both easy to learn and program, and its use is in high demand.
As an OR student, unless you are independently wealthy and studying OR only as a hobby, you owe it to yourself to make a living after graduating. Read job ads from OR/MS Today and INFORMS Online and search the Web for jobs associated with such topics as "fixed-income finance" and "supply-chain planning" to understand industry needs. Here is an abridged sample ad: "OR is a small, specialist group within IS supporting the strategic and operational decision-making process of senior management. As an OR graduate, you will have a proven track record of delivering solutions for a wide range of supply chain problems. You will take responsibility for analysis (using) OR methods and predictive modeling techniques including discrete event simulation, statistical analysis and forecasting, together with financial modeling and risk assessment." With such jobs as well as Internet-generated opportunities, you do not have to scratch your head as to how to make a living; you just have to ensure you are not mistaken for a philosophy major.
References
- Geoffrion, A.M. and Krishnan R. 2001, "Prospects for operations research in the e-business era," Interfaces, Vol. 31, No. 2, 6-36.
- Sodhi, M. 2001, "Applications and opportunities for operations research in Internet-enabled supply chains and electronic marketplaces," I, Vol. 31, No. 2, 56-69.
ManMohan S. Sodhi (MohanSodhi@aol.com) is vice president at Gandiva and the founder of the OR news group, sci.op-research.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2001 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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