Don N. Kleinmuntz

INFORMS President, 2009

Don N. Kleinmuntz was the 15th President of INFORMS. He is the cofounder and Executive Vice President at Strata Decision Technology LLC (SDT). Established in 1996, SDT develops and implements software for budgeting, financial planning, and decision making with a particular focus on U.S. hospitals and healthcare provider organizations. With over 70 employees working from offices in Champaign and Chicago, Illinois, SDT systems are in use at medical centers and multihospital health care systems comprising between 20 and 30 percent of all US acute care hospitals. Dr. Kleinmuntz is the architect of his firm’s approach to advanced analytics. As Executive Vice President, he serves as the company’s Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer, and provides guidance on advanced analytics to the consulting and software R&D teams.

After receiving one of the first doctorates from the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, Don began a 25-year academic career. He held faculty positions in the business schools at the University of Texas at Austin, (5 years), MIT (3 years), and the University of Illinois at Urbana (17 years). He helped found SDT while maintaining his faculty responsibilities at Illinois. He left full-time teaching in 2006 to devote more time to the company. For three years since then he held a part-time research faculty position at the University of Southern California, where he was affiliated with the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events.

Dr. Kleinmuntz's professional interests focus on developing methods and approaches to apply advanced analytics effectively to improve business decision making and financial analysis. This includes work on mathematical and computational models of decision processes, decision making by accounting and financial professionals, resource allocation models, and decision analysis applications to healthcare management and homeland security. Dr. Kleinmuntz has consulted on decision processes and decision analysis applications with a wide variety of corporations, professional service firms, hospitals, healthcare systems, and government agencies at both the state and federal level. His publications have appeared in such journals as The Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Management Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Psychological Review, Psychological Science, and System Dynamics Review.

He is a Fellow of INFORMS (2007) and of the Association for Psychological Science (1997). Don is an active member of INFORMS. In addition to being President, he was Treasurer (2003-2006) and was a member of both the Finance and Investment Committees. Dr. Kleinmuntz was a founding Editor-in-Chief of Decision Analysis (2001-2006) and an Associate Editor of Management Science (1995-2001). He is an active member of the INFORMS Decision Analysis Society, and is his company’s representative on the INFORMS Roundtable

As 2009 President of INFORMS, Don focused the Institute’s attention on innovation and growth, particularly in reaching out to the vast number of practitioners who are not engaged with INFORMS. In connection with this effort, INFORMS launched a New Initiatives Program to encourage the staff and membership to focus on developing new products and services, including exploring the area of continuing professional education. INFORMS also worked on building stronger relationships with our international sister societies and our many international members. The year ended with the launch of a completely new version of our web site, INFORMS Online, accompanied by a concerted effort to increase INFORMS’ participation in and use of “Web 2.0” technologies, including social networking.

BA (Statistics), 1978, MBA (Statistics), 1980, PhD (Statistics and Decision Research), 1982, all at Chicago.

Don N. Kleinmuntz's Awards