Abstract
I have read the paper (Ormerod, 1999) by Richard Ormerod in OR Insight with interest and I do not disagree with his analysis that the future of OR appears to be with external consultants, but I believe that there will still be a role for internal OR, albeit less glamorous, in the fields of (a) monitoring systems’ output and performance (b) system implementation.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
H G Jones
H G JONES, now ninety-two years old, can lay claim more than most of us to having spent a lifetime in OR. Involved from the early days of the discipline, working first in the glass and then the steel industry, HG has lived through some of the key changes in OR, following the early promise of the early 1950s, when the need to overcome the post-war shortages of consumer goods gave a boost to the scientifically-based methods which had gained such prevalence in wartime Britain. Early work on, primarily, capacity planning sowed the seeds of a career which finally took him to whisky distilling - not a bad place to end up! Asked in 1994 where he saw the future, HG unequivocally answered “the application of computers”: clearly he is still looking to the ongoing development of the discipline.For a more detailed review of HG's life and times, readers are referred to the May 1994 OR Newsletter, from which the above is abstracted.