I enjoy walking along canals – the hills are not too steep. I’m therefore delighted to lead off this issue with an account of how reliability theory has proved useful in helping the Canal & River Trust understand their asset risks, allowing improved prioritisation of their annual expenditure as they maintain, manage and care for the waterways.
Whilst I’m attracted to canals, I’m not attracted to norovirus. Avoiding its transmission is important. The work of David Lane and colleagues suggests that reducing foodborne transmission by 20% would result in a 9% reduction of norovirus infection but reducing person to person transmission has a much greater impact. In this case a 20% reduction would bring down the infection by almost 90%. The research reported here could lead to a better understanding of how to reduce the impact of a highly unpleasant infection.
Was Trump’s crowd bigger than Obama’s crowd at their inaugurations? Many will remember the brouhaha. What may not be widely known is that the science behind the headlines to which Donald Trump took so much exception was provided by Manchester academic Keith Still. He made the headlines three times in one week, culminating in the New York Times ‘Crowd Scientists Say Women’s March in Washington Had 3 Times as Many People as Trump’s inauguration’. You can read about it in this issue.
It’s good to see that O.R. and analytics continue to make an impact in many different environments. I hope you enjoy reading these stories and the others, and not just when you are cruising gently down a canal. Electronic copies of all issues continue to be available at https://issuu.com/orsimpact. For future issues of this free magazine, please subscribe at https://www.theorsociety.com/what-we-do/publications/magazines/impact-magazine/.
OPERATIONAL RESEARCH AND DECISION ANALYTICS
Operational Research (O.R.) is the discipline of applying appropriate analytical methods to help those who run organisations make better decisions. It’s a ‘real world’ discipline with a focus on improving the complex systems and processes that underpin everyone’s daily life – O.R. is an improvement science. For over 70 years, O.R. has focussed on supporting decision making in a wide range of organisations. It is a major contributor to the development of decision analytics, which has come to prominence because of the availability of big data. Work under the O.R. label continues, though some prefer names such as business analysis, decision analysis, analytics or management science. Whatever the name, O.R. analysts seek to work in partnership with managers and decision makers to achieve desirable outcomes that are informed and evidence-based. As the world has become more complex, problems tougher to solve using gut-feel alone, and computers become increasingly powerful, O.R. continues to develop new techniques to guide decision-making. The methods used are typically quantitative, tempered with problem structuring methods to resolve problems that have multiple stakeholders and conflicting objectives.
Impact aims to encourage further use of O.R. by demonstrating the value of these techniques in every kind of organisation – large and small, private and public, for-profit and not-for-profit. To find out more about how decision analytics could help your organisation make more informed decisions see www.scienceofbetter.co.uk. O.R. is the ‘science of better’.