In May of this year INFORMS (the primary professional society for Operations Research) had a vibrant conversation on their discussion board questioning what the field of Analytics is and how it does or does not overlap with OR. My favorite piece from this exchange came from Patrick Noonan who suggested that decision makers should answer two central questions:
- "What should I do, given what I believe?"
- "What should I believe, given what I observe?
While you will frequently need to iterate between the two questions (and this combination is in fact what Professor Noonan describes as Analytics), I do think it is useful to think of decision making as being made up of these two pieces. The first question is a really succinct description of OR, and the second question sums up what statistics is good for.
Despite the overwhelming popularity of Analytics currently, I do think there is significant value in looking at these two questions in isolation as well as together. A big emphasis in Lean is data collection to understand your current state before you implement changes. Articulating what you wish you knew can be a useful exercise before even stating your problem. At the same time, examining your data carefully is critical to doing anything useful with it at all. Otherwise you might conclude that flashlight apps have the most valuable ads.
Hopefully this explanation helps any of my friends whose eyes glazed over when I said I do Operations Research!
Despite the overwhelming popularity of Analytics currently, I do think there is significant value in looking at these two questions in isolation as well as together. A big emphasis in Lean is data collection to understand your current state before you implement changes. Articulating what you wish you knew can be a useful exercise before even stating your problem. At the same time, examining your data carefully is critical to doing anything useful with it at all. Otherwise you might conclude that flashlight apps have the most valuable ads.
Hopefully this explanation helps any of my friends whose eyes glazed over when I said I do Operations Research!
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