O.R./Analytics at Work Blog

There has been a lot of buzz about the analytics movement here at INFORMS beginning with the Capgemeini study that was completed last fall. The INFORMS Board of Directors have approved funding to build out the executive forum at the rebranded Analytics Conference, as well as developing certification and continuing education programs. The INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research set unbelievable attendance records. There is now an Analytics Section of INFORMS, and the readership of Analytics Magazine is growing by leaps and bounds. Would you like to offer your two cents? Participate in our online survey about developing a certification program for individuals in the analytics field. We may be onto something here.

Part of the OR/MS challenge (at least from a marketing point of view) has been how to explain/convey/sell operations research to the uninitiated masses. This blog has been one way to learn about different viewpoints, our twitter peeps are getting quite chatty, and there are some great discussions on LinkedIn. But these conversations tend to reach an already involved audience. We’d love to spread the word about OR/MS and analytics to a wider audience. So June’s Blog Challenge (in honor of the upcoming Harry Potter final installment) will be O.R. for Muggles. Please send your entries to graphics@mail.informs.org.

Our bloggers extraordinaire offer their take on the subject of May's Blog Challenge, O.R. and Analytics

• Analyse This! : Analytics explained and applied
  Capgemini Figure it out blog
• Welcome to the Insight Age Larry D’Agostino
• Green O.R. Job Skills: Business Analytics vs. Sustainability Ian Frommer
• On "Analytics" and related fields Harlan Harris
• Terrorism Analytics Laura McLay
• Analytics and Operations Research -- Learning from One Another Anna Nagurney
• Analytics and Operations Research; a practitioner’s view John Poppelaars
• When the Data Changes Before the Model Even Finishes Solving Patricia Randall
• Will Analytics Drag O.R. Back to Its Roots? Paul Rubin
• How Analytics makes Operations Research the next big thing Thiago Serra
• April 1963 discussion: OR v Analytics Shivaram Subramanian
• Business Analytics and Operations Research: Tomato, To-mah-toe, Tractor! Mike Trick
• Should You Hire Security When Tenting Your House? Tallys Yunes

As my operations-research readers know, analytics has become the word en vogue in the community - the INFORMS Practice conference was recently renamed INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research to reflect this trend, as Mike Trick pointed out in this blog post of his. My non-operations-research readers will be left thinking: what exactly is operations research anyway? Research on operations? That is partly true - OR (as we call it, which makes for some interesting Google queries since the web service mistakes it for "or" (as in "either/or") emerged from the need to improve military logistics during World War II, but has become much broader than that, now representing the broad field of quantitative decision-making.

According to this Wikipedia page, "operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations"; this certainly is the most awful definition of OR that I've ever seen. The second paragraph is more accurate, stating: "Employing techniques from other mathematical sciences --- such as mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, and mathematical optimization --- operations research arrives at optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex decision-making problems."

Few non-OR trained people will naturally come to the same conclusion when first faced with operations research, and the issue of how to call what we are doing is one that we have all struggled with, whenever anyone asks us about our profession. (I stick to: "I do mathematical models for business.") In contrast, analytics has become a much more accepted term in the business community, where books by Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris have emerged as market leaders: "Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning" (2007) is a landmark book in that respect, and was followed earlier this year by "Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results". These books are published by Harvard Business Press, which certainly added to their legitimacy.

Mike Trick recently posted on his Twitter feed a graph, using a new Google Labs tool called n-grams, showing the incidence of words like "operations research" and "analytics" in books; when this morning a friend and reader of this blog sent me a more complete graph including "industrial engineering" and "systems engineering", I figured it was time for a blog post. Here is the graph, courtesy of Andrew Ross. You will notice that the use of "operations research" abruptly rose in the 1950s and peaked in the early 1960s, to undergo a fast-paced decline ever after. This is not good news for our profession, as "operations research" is part of the brand we communicate to the media and potential business collaborators. Analytics, on the other hand, is currently the most popular of the terms by far, and the trend does not seem to be slowing down by far...

Read the rest of this post on Aurelie Thiele's blog Thoughts on business, engineering and higher education

The strategic planning subcommittee of the 2011 INFORMS Practice Conference Organizing Committee has decided to take steps to re-configure and re-brand the Practice Conference to better serve the emerging business analytics field.

Based on an analytics market study commissioned by INFORMS and performed by Capgemini Consulting, it was found that there is an emerging view of business analytics in the business world that is different than the traditional view of operations research in business.

The definition of analytics that emerged from the study is that:

Business analytics facilitates realization of business objectives through reporting of data to analyze trends, creating predictive models for forecasting and optimizing business processes for enhanced performance.

There is also a view that business analytics are “business as usual” with the analytical activities embedded in a multitude of business practices and that operations research is a specialized set of skills that are called upon for complex problems.

The study also contained recommendations regarding products and services that INFORMS could offer to become more in tune with the growing business analytics trend, some of which are a natural fit with the Practice Conference. The recommendations that the Conference strategic planning subcommittee chose to incorporate to enhance the current Practice Conference offerings are:

• more of a vertical focus to some tracks – including a track concentrating on training
• an expanded analytics executive program
• addition of a job fair for professionals
• case studies in applying analytics
• a track devoted to the analytics process

With these enhancements planned, it was decided to rebrand the Conference so that it captures the attention of business analysts without losing the support of traditional attendees from the operations research community. So, INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research was born.

The new title includes the key term “business analytics”, of course, but removes the word “practice” since it is more of an inward-looking term and is now covered by the word “business.” “Operations research” was kept because the Conference will in fact continue to report on and showcase all the core competencies of our discipline. It is, after all, a key element of the broader analytics field. Please note we have kept our current tag line “Applying Science to the Art of Business” because it is well liked, well known, and continues to describe the proceedings quite well.

With this strategic change, we now expect to attract a broader analytics audience to the Conference in 2011 while keeping our current attendees happy with a substantial operations research program. Please give us your thoughts on our Practice (or should we say “Analytics”) Conference reconfiguration and rebranding efforts.

Gary Bennett is Director of Marketing and Member Services for INFORMS.

David Leonhardi is a Decision Consultant at Boeing Commercial Airplane Group and this year’s General Chair of the 2011 Analytics Conference Organizing Committee.

Some books are ground-breaking. Others read like inflated magazine articles from authors who fill pages with trite observations for the pleasure of charging $15 for the paperback of their musings. "A Whole New Mind" belongs to the second category. (I shudder to think it was once offered in hardcover, for which the publisher charged $25 or more.)

The author's thesis is that the era of left-brain dominance is gone and people now need to develop the right side of their brain. Goodbye lawyers, accountants, software engineers; hello designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers. The author lists the following three factors as having contributed to this situation:

• Abundance: "The prosperity [L-directed thinking] has unleashed has placed a premium on less rational, more R-Directed sensibilities - beauty, spirituality, emotion."
• Asia: companies have been more and more knowledge work to Asia.
• Automation: routine tasks in many jobs are now turned over to computers.

Read entire blog post on Aurelie Thiele's blog, Thoughts on business, engineering and higher education