President's Desk
Getting the Word Out
By Mike Trick
INFORMS President
trick@cmu.edu
A little while ago, I received an e-mail from a friend of mine who is editor-in-chief of Information Week. Every issue, my friend writes a column on current happenings in information technology. For his next issue, he wanted to write about operations research. Could I please list for him five successes for the field in the last 10 years? And could I suggest five upcoming trends his readers should know about? And, by the way, could I respond in one hour, since he (like me) tends to start his columns a little close to deadline?What questions! How could I pick just five success stories and five trends? I e-mailed some people around INFORMS and got a couple dozen suggestions within 10 minutes. In the end, I ended up discussing airline operations planning, military logistics in the Gulf War and Afghanistan, revenue management, combinatorial auctions and the optimization of medical treatments. But I had regrets as soon as I sent off the e-mail. How could I leave out all of supply chain management, financial engineering, scheduling and timetabling, and countless other success stories?
For the future trends question, I suggested ubiquitous optimization (more embedded optimization systems due to improved technology and algorithms), improved handling of huge data sets, robust solution methods, better handling of randomness, and a general vision of operations research everywhere. Again, there were so many possibilities.
The result was a very nice and prominent column in Information Week (July 15 issue, available at www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020712S0006). Information Week reaches more than 500,000 subscribers. Their reporters are now attending our conferences. At our Montreal Practice Conference, they found a number of story ideas they will be developing over the next few months.
Right after that experience, I attended the triennial conference of IFORS. At that conference, many society leaders were bemoaning the difficulty in getting word out on what we do. Despite the Information Week article, I agreed with the others: it is extremely hard to let people know about our field. There are certainly some successes: Barry List, director of Public Affairs for INFORMS, has placed many stories about our field (see www.informs.org/Press for an ongoing listing). The (British) Operational Research Society has been developing a program entitled "OR Inside" to make executives, students and the general public aware of the use of operations research.
Still, there is not enough recognition of our field, and this lack of recognition hurts us. We get insufficient student interest, decreased federal funding, declining course offerings and limited executive interest because we are not as well known as we should be.
At the IFORS meeting, it was suggested that OR/MS people are, by their nature, not good marketers for the field. By training, we look at all sides of an issue, and are hesitant to make judgments without sufficient data. We tend to be honest and complete in our evaluations. To an outsider, this can appear wishy-washy, and our successes seem limited due to our reticence to overstate our case. While we are great at creating marketing models and evaluating results, we are not as good at marketing ourselves.
INFORMS, as an organization, is working hard to make our field better known through the efforts of Barry and many volunteer committees. There are things members can do to help:
1. Tell people what you do! Ten years ago, when I was asked what I did, I generally replied "Well, it has to do with computers and the like." Now I say "Thanks for asking. I work in a great field called operations research, and let me tell you all the wonderful things we do." Some of the time, people back away slowly and avoid me for the evening, but often enough I get to talk about the field and its successes. My conversations with the editor-in-chief of Information Week began exactly this way.
2. Work with your organization's publicity department to let people know what you do. Whether it is an article in your company's internal newsletter or an ongoing relationship with local and national newspapers, having people know what you (and our field) do can be invaluable to your success. OR/MS does not exist in a vacuum; we require the input and support from many people. Publicity can get us that support.
3. Help train the next generation. For more than 10 years, the Public Awareness Committee of INFORMS has held one-day workshops for high school math teachers at our national meetings. These workshops are highly valued by the teachers, and represent a great opportunity to teach young people about our field. The committee would now like to expand this effort by separating our teacher training from the national conference. The goal in this program is to train 50 or more INFORMS members to be workshop leaders in training teachers in their locales. The committee has already developed a lot of material, including instructional modules, videos and presentations; they need people to train local teachers in the use of this material.
At the San Jose National Meeting in November, the committee will be holding a training session for volunteers for this program. For further information and to sign up for the session, send a note to Ken Chelst (kchelst@wayne.edu).
4. Let Barry List (barry.list@informs.org) know about your successes. If you have a project that you think is of general interest, let him know about it!
There are a lot of successes in our field; we all need to work at letting people know about them.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2002 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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