{"id":554,"date":"2009-02-08T12:04:03","date_gmt":"2009-02-08T16:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/?p=554"},"modified":"2009-02-08T12:04:03","modified_gmt":"2009-02-08T16:04:03","slug":"keep-the-operations-research-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/02\/08\/keep-the-operations-research-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Keep the Operations Research Name!"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, INFORMS<\/a> spent significant amounts of money on its “Science of Better”<\/a> campaign in an effort to brand the phrase “Operations Research”.\u00a0 This was not an easy or uncontroversial decision.\u00a0 Even choosing “Operations Research” was controversial.\u00a0 Practically everyone agrees that it is a lousy name for a field:\u00a0 it is uninformative and easily confused with many other fields.\u00a0 But it is the historical name for the field, and trying to rebrand our field with a new name looked (and looks) hopeless.\u00a0 So “Operations Research” it is, and the Science of Better campaign tried to get people to associate the phrase with success, competitive advantage, and all sorts of other good things.\u00a0 People like Tom Cook, Irv Lustig, and many others put in tremendous efforts to get this campaign going.<\/p>\n

By its nature, an advertising campaign for an idea is a hard thing to do, particularly for a society\u00a0 of just 12,000 or so.\u00a0 Spending a million or two was possible, but not tens or hundreds of millions.\u00a0 That 30 second ad at the Super Bowl was right out.\u00a0 The campaign did lots of interesting things, some of which (like the website and the enhanced Edelman Award<\/a>) continue, but it is hard to find a meter that moved because of the campaign.\u00a0 Despite that, I am very happy we had the campaign:\u00a0 it reminded a lot of us as to the value of our field, and let others know of that value.<\/p>\n

However, just as cities like Pittsburgh get tremendous advertising by being backdrops for national sporting event telecasts, our field gets its best advertising just in how departments and schools get mentioned.\u00a0 In the New York Times<\/em> today there is an article on how students at Princeton are having trouble getting jobs on Wall Street<\/a>.\u00a0 While the overall tenor of the article is depressing, the phrases that include operations research are very nice:<\/p>\n

Despite being in the rigorous Operations Research and Financial Engineering program<\/a>, …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…vast armies of Wall Street recruiters have traditionally taken over the historic Nassau Inn nearby to woo not just Operations Research and Financial Engineering whizzes but innocent art history majors as well.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sure, it would be better to have been part of an article on how everyone in operations research is getting a $250,000 job and guaranteed life-fulfillment, but having the New York Times readers associate “operations research” with rigor and woo-ability is an association that we literally cannot buy.<\/p>\n

So if you are part of a department (either in academia or business) considering replacing “operations research” with a trendier name (“analytics”, “business intelligence”, “information engineering” and so on), you might want to fight that move:\u00a0 consider the fate of all the groups who went with “eBusiness” and “web” ten years ago.\u00a0 And those of you who changed to something more “with-it”:\u00a0 come on back!\u00a0 There is still room under the umbrella for you.\u00a0 You can be part of the “operations research” success.<\/p>\n

Note added 7PM:<\/strong> I see the tagline on the Edelman Page<\/a> is “The Best of Applied Analytics”.\u00a0 Even INFORMS (INFAA?) isn’t immune to trendy names.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, INFORMS spent significant amounts of money on its “Science of Better” campaign in an effort to brand the phrase “Operations Research”.\u00a0 This was not an easy or uncontroversial decision.\u00a0 Even choosing “Operations Research” was controversial.\u00a0 Practically everyone agrees that it is a lousy name for a field:\u00a0 it is uninformative and … Continue reading “Keep the Operations Research Name!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-informs","category-or-in-the-press"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mat.tepper.cmu.edu\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}