INFORMS Open Forum

Thanks for asking this question, Zohar. I hope that people find it thought provoking and share their feedback here in this thread. I've had instances of people forwarding me their answer to my email instead of sharing their response here with the entire INFORMS community. 

Hi Zohar,

It might be easier to define who wouldn't find INFORMS to be a suitable professional home (those who do not want to take an appropriate systematic approach to identifying and resolving problems).

hi Zohar - you have an interesting perspective. I like the way this thinking is going. I am interdisciplinary (I studied policy/social science in addition to math/stats/modeling), so your definition resonates with me. I'm not sure though that it would resonate with all INFORMS members - those focused on methods and theory may not see themselves as solving problems. Perhaps we'd have more impact if they did, but we'd need to do some change management across the field to make that happen. 

I like the focus on solving problems with math, data, algorithms - I might add statistics and I would use "modeling" rather than algorithms. I think that's what you mean, but let me know if that is not the case. Other fields solve problems and teach critical thinking, but once it moves into calculations, I would say it falls into the OR and Analytics domain that INFORMS encompasses.

Finally, as a decision analyst, I would take it further (again, maybe leaving some INFORMS members behind which is not a good approach) and I would say we solve problems to inform decisons, tieing the problem solving to specific needs in the public and private sectors. 

Thanks for starting the conversation

G'day Zohar,

Comments so far are in the direction I would take. A possible further extension is suggested by Schopenhauer's definition of genius: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see". perhaps we help clients to see the invisible problem?

Thanks for your intiative in examining this matter.

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Mike Allison
Director
8-Sigma Consulting Pty. Ltd.
Australia
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INFORMS members apply advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions.  For me, this is a tent that all INFORMS members can relate to.  I'm open to debate on that.

Sound familiar?  When we did the Science of Better campaign 20 years ago, we used an external marketing firm to do the market research and help INFORMS with branding the field. At the time, we defined "operations research" as "The discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions."  You can still see much of the material that was created back then at The Science of Better website .

Today, I would argue that much (but not all) of "predictive analytics", "prescriptive analytics", "data science", "machine learning" and "Practical AI" (see Mike Watson's blog post on how that is defined) could fall under the umbrella of "advanced analytics methods" that "help make better decisions."  20 years ago, those 5 terms were not used by many people inside or outside of INFORMS.  (One way of confirming that is to do a Google Trends analysis of those terms). 

This also aligns with Kara Morgan's comment where she wrote "we solve problems to inform decisions".

Hi,

I have one suggestion to change the question around to "...INFORMS is the best fit for those that..." from "...who belong in INFORMS..."  I think the prior narrative could be misinterpreted.

Jim