Corporate Planning and Operational Research

Abstract

Corporate Planning is a multi-dimensional activity. It can no longer be thought of as a largely analytical process to which OR can make a contribution through its quantitative techniques. This may be a reason why Operational Researchers seem to be losing their pre-eminent position as corporate model builders. So that it can regain that position OR will have to consider constructing models that incorporate political as well as psychological variables and models that allow managers to manage.

Metadecision making: rehabilitating interdisciplinarity in the decision sciences

“…Indeed, the vast majority of peacetime OR had been 'tactical' and was reflected in a gradual slippage of the status of industry-based OR groups in relation to senior management (Eilon, 1975(Eilon, , 1977Rosenhead, 1978;Kirby, 2000). At this point, Patrick Blackett, who is often referred to as the father of OR, wrote of the 'evils of increasingly complex mathematics which served only to obscure real issues', thus sparking a debate within the OR Society, which threatened to split the community into practitioner and theoretician camps (Eilon, 1975(Eilon, , 1977Dando and Sharp, 1978;Harris, 1978;Radford, 1978;Rosenhead, 1978;Sadler, 1978;Dando and Bennett, 1981). The debate reached new heights when one of the pioneers of American OR (and co-author of one of the first OR text books) Russell Ackoff publicly discontinued his association with US operations research, which he believed was trapped within a false paradigm of the possibility of objectivity and optimization.…”