Profession faces tough questions.(PRESIDENT'S DESK)

I recently attended the 40th anniversary celebration of the Institute for Operations Research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. I was asked by the organizers to speak on the challenges facing the field of operations research, specifically the health and future of INFORMS. Although I've studied and worked in the field for more than a quarter of a century, I had never given serious thought to these issues. I have a very good view of the challenges and health of O.R. within a portion of the business community, but I had never taken the larger view, encompassing both the academic side and the application side of the profession. To broaden my perspective, I asked members of the INFORMS board to share their views based on specific questions posed by our Swiss colleagues, which I have paraphrased here.

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of O.R. as a professional discipline? What makes O.R. unique?

2. How is the existence of O.R. justified?

3. How visible is O.R. in the United States in academia and society? What can/should be done to increase visibility?

4. What are the intellectual challenges in the coming years?

The field of operations research has several distinguishing characteristics: its breadth, as evidenced by the variety of techniques and tools employed; its depth, as evidenced by the rigor and complexity of many of the individual tools and techniques; and its range, as evidenced by the number of application areas and linkages to other fields. O.R. is sometimes distinguished from other fields by its use of abstraction; specific problems are abstracted to models, and results (complexity, algorithmic, structural, etc) are derived for the models, rather than for the individual problems. Finally, we noted that O.R. has no single natural "home" in either academia or industry. In academia, it lives in engineering school, business schools and in some math departments; in industry, it may fall under finance, information technology, strategy or other organizations. As we listed these distinguishing characteristics, we debated as to whether each was a strength of O.R. or a weakness. Each characteristic can be used as a strength or could be regarded as a vulnerability. As for uniqueness, any attempt to separate O.R. from another discipline serves only to limit the field of O.R.

Historically, a strength of our field has been our ability and willingness to assimilate techniques from other fields and to apply abstraction and analytic methods to problems (either real world or theoretical) that had not been well modeled. The operations research literature contains numerous articles testifying to the value of individual O.R. exercises in industry and government, and our practitioner community can cite far more examples that have not been published. Given the range of academic and industrial positions held by our society members and by graduates of our academic programs, we can also argue that O.R. ...