I'm Moved!

I have moved this blog. If your browser does not automatically redirect, please click here.

Change of Software?

Now that I have gone over 50 posts, it looks like I will keep this blog going (thanks to the loyal reader out there!). Right now, the blog is hosted by blogger. I have now installed wordpress on my own machine, and have transferred things over. Having my own wordpress installation allows me more flexibility in add-ons for the blog. Can anyone make the case for keeping it on blogger? You can compare at the new system.

Optimize magazine and Operational Excellence

Optimize is a 70,000 circulation magazine aimed at CIOs and CTOs. The topic of the May, 2006 issue is "Operational Excellence", and it contains a host of articles about operations research, one done by yours truly. My article, entitled "CIO as Business Predictor" tries to talk about the role uncertainty plays in decision making and how OR approaches can help address these issues. The sidebars in the article describe the finalists in this year's Edelman Competition.

A second article, entitled "Bringing Unity to Cardinal Health", described how IT and operational excellence go hand-in-hand. There is a sidebar of an interview with Irv Lustig from ILOG on the how IT and OR interact.

The Editor's Note to the issue also talks about OR quite a bit, and says some very nice things about me! I think I will get it framed and send to my mother.

Between this and the coverage by Stephen Baker from Business Week, OR is getting noticed quite a bit these days in the more mainstream press.

Stephen Baker on Operations Research

Stephen Baker, the author of the Business Week cover story on how Math Will Rock Your World, is rapidly becoming a highly visible writer about Operations Research. His May 4 blog entry, entitled "Why journalists don't cover how things work" had some comments on his experience at the INFORMS Practice Conference:

At the O.R. conference (the association is called INFORMS), there were far too many interesting presentations for one person to cover them all. The people behind operations at Intel, IBM, the Army, Ford and plenty of others provided inside looks. Beat reporters of those companies could have feasted on these lectures. But they weren't there.

Why? The press covers news, stocks, companies and personalities. But try pitching a cover story on operations. People think it's ... boring. Trouble is, if we want to know where things are going, we have to understand how they work. And when the process is transformative, as it often is in OR, there's nothing boring about it. The winner of the annual Informs Franz Edelman award, by the way, was the Warner Robins Air Logistics Center. They overhauled the maintenance of jumbo C-5 transport aircraft, reducing repair time by 33%. This means that these monsters, which cost taxpayers $2.3 billion each, spend more time in the air and less time in the shop.

If Stephen keeps this up, we may see lots more press coverage.