Going With The Flow
Somewhere in an alternate universe… The INFORMS board members sat in the conference room and wrestled with a recurring question: what should they do about analytics? They had hoped that the problem...
View ArticleAt The Heart Of Analytics
“operational research – at the heart of analytics”. This phrase is the banner headline on the home page of the website of the British OR Society. (http://www.theorsociety.com/) The January 12, 2015...
View ArticleConfusion Over Analytics
The term analytics emerged in November, 2005. In the chart shown below, the relative number of Google searches on the term analytics from 1/1/04 to the present are displayed. Searches For Analytics In...
View ArticleAnalytics: A Conceptual Framework
In the 12/17/14 INFORMS Today Podcast, Glenn Wegryn observes that analytics is divided into two distinct camps. He notes that they tend to come from different organizational backgrounds and he...
View ArticleCertification Wars
“Jim, you look beat.” “Oh, hi Mary, I was up late crunching the numbers.” ‘Oh?” “You know, since The Alliance entered the analytics certification market, we’ve been losing market share.” “I know. It’s...
View ArticleWill Operations Research Survive?
There have been some troubling signs: a 2010 article in OR/MS Today suggested that analytics would subsume operations research; a 2013 LinkedIn discussion asked “Will Big Data end Operations...
View ArticleShould We Re-Brand Operations Research?
There are some in the operations research community who want to re-brand operations research. They would like to be called analytics professionals. The reasoning behind this appears to be the...
View ArticleBig Data and Tulip Bulbs
In Holland, during the winter of 1636/1637, the price of tulip bulbs rose dramatically. By February, the price of certain bulbs was equal to the price of a large house. Then suddenly, the price of...
View ArticleHidden In Plain Sight
I do not usually subscribe to conspiracy theories. However, I find myself wondering if operations research could have reached its current state of obscurity by chance. Consider what you might do, if...
View ArticleApplied Research
Have you ever read a research paper that began something like the following?: “Consider the situation were there is a single customer, and exactly two producers of widgets. Demand for widgets follows a...
View ArticleWhat Is Analytics?
There is a surprising admission in an article entitled ‘What Is Analytics?’: “It’s not likely that we’ll ever arrive at a conclusive definition of analytics…” In an article entitled ‘Operational...
View ArticleAnalytics And String Theory
The notion has arisen that analytics is an emerging field that represents a convergence of the quantitative decision sciences. For example, in a 2015 paper in Interfaces, the authors state: “…the...
View ArticleNot Your Father’s Society
[Virtual interview June 6, 2037 between Steve Smith, executive editor of ‘Quantum Systems Review’, and Jack Roberts president of the ‘American Association of Certified Analytics Professionals’...
View ArticleThe Consequences Of Obscurity
In a recent blog post, Polly Mitchell-Guthrie, when referring to an operations research project at UPS, wrote: “Does it really matter what we call it, if people value what was done and want to share...
View ArticleData Driven
We see a lot written about data-driven decisions. For example, an article on the Harvard Business Review website begins: “Not a week goes by without us publishing something here at HBR about the value...
View ArticleProblem Centricity
Based on a recent discussion on LinkedIn titled “OR and Data Science”, there appears to be quite a bit of uncertainty surrounding the question of how operations research and data science compare to...
View ArticleAnalytics Defined
For this post, I provide a link to my article entitled ‘Analytics Defined: A Conceptual Framework’ that was published in the June, 2016 issue of ‘ORMS Today’. A PDF copy of the article has been placed...
View ArticleAnalytics Maturity
A young child begins by crawling, learns to walk, and eventually gains sufficient mastery to run. An analogous process is proposed by advocates of analytics maturity models: organizations must pass...
View ArticleCertification Wars
“Jim, you look beat.” “Oh, hi Mary, I was up late crunching the numbers.” ‘Oh?” “You know, since The Alliance entered the analytics certification market, we’ve been losing market share.” “I know. It’s...
View ArticleWill Operations Research Survive?
There have been some troubling signs: a 2010 article in OR/MS Today suggested that analytics would subsume operations research; a 2013 LinkedIn discussion asked “Will Big Data end Operations...
View Article
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