INFORMS Open Forum

I'm sharing my latest paper with Tho Le and Thibaut Vidal, "A Roadmap for Making Operations Research More Accessible: Insights from the Rise of Machine Learning," which is now published online and open-access in the INFORMS Journal on Data Science.

We ask: What can operations research learn from the explosive rise of machine learning?

Our paper offers a roadmap to make OR more accessible, visible, and impactful-in both academia and industry. We propose 10 practical action items to help OR thrive.

This work is both a call to action and a hopeful vision for the future of OR. We would love to hear your thoughts.

Read the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1287/ijds.2025.0076

Laura

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Laura Albert
Industrial and Systems Engineering
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Thanks for sharing your article, Laura.  I would like to comment on 2 of the recommendations and one of the paragraphs:

• Action 2: Demystifying OR: Promote case studies highlighting real-world impact and encourage businesses to showcase applications
  • An activity from Action 2:  Collaborate with media to share articles and multimedia content on OR successes, including those resulting from academic-industrial partnerships. 
• Action 3:  Create and disseminate messages for public consumption that emphasizes OR's societal impact with interactive and accessible content
  
  • Objective and an activity from Action 3:
    • Objective: Build an externally facing brand that makes OR understandable, relatable, and engaging.
    • Activities: Commit to sustained advocacy for the profession. Train members of the OR community to engage the media, write op-eds, and develop relationships with media outlets. Publishing news releases about journal papers with impact, new releases about real-world success of OR, op-eds written by OR folks.

And you then have this paragraph:

Moreover, as discussed in the previous section, the OR term is somewhat outdated, so it is important to consider rebranding it with a modern and dynamic image that resonates with younger generations and the tech-savvy and broader AI community. Clear and compelling messaging should be developed to explain what OR is, its benefits, and how it differs from and complements other fields such as ML.

I would like to remind you and others that we have been down this road before, and the lessons learned have been forgotten (but not by me!!). The "Marketing the Profession" campaign that existed from 2002 to about 2006 included research from an outside marketing organization, as well as recommendations on the naming issue, and strategies for engaging the external audience. One of the outcomes of this effort is the Edelman gala, which was designed to be an outward facing campaign to be covered by the external media, but is now an internal celebration of our field's accomplishments.  We created a web site to create "OR Champions" to train the INFORMS membership on how to promote their work.  Once budgets were cut because the INFORMS board did not view marketing the profession as a priority, the effort died.

What we learned back then is that it takes a substantial marketing investment (back then, the estimate from the outside firm was an annual amount of $500,000 in 2005 dollars) to be successful.  But the INFORMS board has never wanted to include this kind of investment as a regular part of the budget. Promoting the OR brand requires a continuous investment to achieve your objectives. And coming up with a new name and promoting that new name to a wide audience is even more expensive.  Over my career, these investments are just something that INFORMS leadership has ever wanted to do.

I agree with you that we should do these things. And maybe someday it will happen.  Frankly, I doubt it.

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-Irv Lustig
Optimization Principal
Princeton Consultants
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I feel like people have been reading my personal thoughts, emails, texts, etc.  While OR is "healthy" it does certainly feel like we constantly have one foot in the grave.  Depending on the circle you run in....people may have no idea what an "Operations Research Analyst" is or is not.  But they want data scientists, ML experts, data and AI engineers, etc.  To me OR is one parent of pretty much all of these fields, and yet is being pushed out by them as younger generations are attracted to seemingly more marketable degrees with less breadth of academic rigor.  I'm careful here, since I think that in many cases these new degrees offer more depth in their specific focus than perhaps a traditional OR degree offers.  I just worry that these paths create people with really good hammers and all the problems they approach are nails.  Like Irv, I really hope that OR finds new life and a reinvigorated path soon.  But I might be a little biased.

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Nicholas Ulmer
CANA LLC
Pacific Grove CA
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Original Message:
Sent: 09-03-2025 10:19
From: Irv Lustig
Subject: A Roadmap for Making Operations Research More Accessible: an open-access paper in the INFORMS Journal on Data Science

Thanks for sharing your article, Laura.  I would like to comment on 2 of the recommendations and one of the paragraphs:

• Action 2: Demystifying OR: Promote case studies highlighting real-world impact and encourage businesses to showcase applications
  • An activity from Action 2:  Collaborate with media to share articles and multimedia content on OR successes, including those resulting from academic-industrial partnerships. 
• Action 3:  Create and disseminate messages for public consumption that emphasizes OR's societal impact with interactive and accessible content
  
  • Objective and an activity from Action 3:
    • Objective: Build an externally facing brand that makes OR understandable, relatable, and engaging.
    • Activities: Commit to sustained advocacy for the profession. Train members of the OR community to engage the media, write op-eds, and develop relationships with media outlets. Publishing news releases about journal papers with impact, new releases about real-world success of OR, op-eds written by OR folks.

And you then have this paragraph:

Moreover, as discussed in the previous section, the OR term is somewhat outdated, so it is important to consider rebranding it with a modern and dynamic image that resonates with younger generations and the tech-savvy and broader AI community. Clear and compelling messaging should be developed to explain what OR is, its benefits, and how it differs from and complements other fields such as ML.

I would like to remind you and others that we have been down this road before, and the lessons learned have been forgotten (but not by me!!). The "Marketing the Profession" campaign that existed from 2002 to about 2006 included research from an outside marketing organization, as well as recommendations on the naming issue, and strategies for engaging the external audience. One of the outcomes of this effort is the Edelman gala, which was designed to be an outward facing campaign to be covered by the external media, but is now an internal celebration of our field's accomplishments.  We created a web site to create "OR Champions" to train the INFORMS membership on how to promote their work.  Once budgets were cut because the INFORMS board did not view marketing the profession as a priority, the effort died.

What we learned back then is that it takes a substantial marketing investment (back then, the estimate from the outside firm was an annual amount of $500,000 in 2005 dollars) to be successful.  But the INFORMS board has never wanted to include this kind of investment as a regular part of the budget. Promoting the OR brand requires a continuous investment to achieve your objectives. And coming up with a new name and promoting that new name to a wide audience is even more expensive.  Over my career, these investments are just something that INFORMS leadership has ever wanted to do.

I agree with you that we should do these things. And maybe someday it will happen.  Frankly, I doubt it.

------------------------------
-Irv Lustig
Optimization Principal
Princeton Consultants
------------------------------

Dear Professor Albert,
Dear Laura,

Thank you very much for this valuable contribution! It's always good and valuable to hear from you, just think of your valuable contribution to a EURO session "Moments in the History of OR" in Copenhagen.

Your current contribution spontaneously reminded us of a somewhat different "accessibility" of OR-MS Analytics, namely that for its users or practitioners, namely decision-makers and managers. 

For them, "accessibility" can often mean quick, immediate, and not least playful access to and implementation of OR-MS Analytics, from optimal experimental design to model selection, from parameter tuning to sensitivity analysis, from product, distribution or portfolio design to simulation.

In the future, efficient GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) and even CADs (Computer Aided Design) will be useful for this, which can also help overcome the reservations and "fear of touch" of those leaders, decision-makers, and managers.

Application areas include aggregate production planning, other areas of logistics, the entire business and scientific world, art and culture, administration, and government.

We would be happy to share examples with you upon request.

Best regards,
All the best,
Willi and Candidate, PhD. Selma Gütmen (FEM, PUT)

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Gerhard-Wilhelm Weber
Professor
Poznan University of Technology
Poznan
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