INSIDE STORY

In the classic 1967 film “The Graduate,” a dazed and confused college graduate named Benjamin Braddock (famously portrayed by a very young Dustin Hoffman) is approached at a cocktail party by Mr. McGuire, a business partner of Ben’s father. Ben had spent his first week home from college mostly floating around in the pool of his parents’ suburban L.A. home, wondering what he was going to do with the rest of his life now that he had his degree. Mr. McGuire puts his arm around Ben’s shoulder and smugly sums up the future of the business world – and Ben’s path to success – in one word: “plastics.”

If the buzz surrounding the recent INFORMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas (see INFORMS President Susan Albin’s column on page 6 and the Q&A with INFORMS President-Elect Rina Schneur on page 42) is any indication, the future of INFORMS and the OR/MS profession can also be summed up in one word: “analytics.”

During a well-attended conference session entitled, appropriately enough, “Analytics: The Future of INFORMS,” INFORMS Board members Anne Robinson and Jack Levis made a compelling case to hitch the Institute’s future to the word that’s now seemingly on the mind of every corporate executive on the planet. Their presentation was based on an extensive study of the “analytics” market and what role INFORMS could or should play in it. The session made it clear that rather than just jumping on the analytics bandwagon, INFORMS aims to get out in front and become “the face of analytics.”

Truth is, the analytics movement is going way too fast to be called a “bandwagon.” It’s more like a bullet train, and, in typical INFORMS fashion, the session attendees couldn’t resist debating whether the proverbial analytics train was approaching the station, was at the station or had already left the station. Just about everyone agreed, however, that INFORMS has to get on the train and do everything it can to become the engineer that drives it.

Also in keeping with an INFORMS tradition that dates all the way back to the founding of the O.R. profession more than 60 years ago, the session attendees debated the definition of the word “analytics” and how it relates to “operations research” and “management science.” Capgemini, the consulting company that conducted the analytics study on INFORMS’ behalf, came up with a three-tiered pyramid to describe the market: descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Under this scenario, O.R. is considered “advanced analytics” and resides at the top of the analytics pyramid dispensing “prescriptive analytics.”

(For the record, my personal favorite “definition” of analytics overheard at the conference: “Analytics converts data into money.” Now that’s a concept any corporate executive can understand and appreciate.)

The irony of it all is that INFORMS and its predecessors, ORSA and TIMS, spent decades and who knows how much money trying to explain what “operations research” is and what it can do to a largely indifferent corporate world. One day this magical word “analytics” falls out of the sky and suddenly every company CEO desperately wants what INFORMS has been trying so hard to sell.

In the movie, “plastics” was a one-word laugh line, but maybe Mr. McGuire was on the right track. He just had the wrong word.

— Peter Horner, editor
horner@lionhrtpub.com