آموزش تحقیق در عملیات برای جمعیت فراموش شده

Typical OR education programmes are focused on those who should professionally act as “performers” (specialists, modellers, etc.) in the process of business problems solving through quantitative modelling and similar formalized procedures. The problem of unsatisfactory level of understanding between “specialists” and “generalists” (managers, e.g.) has been known for decades; yet we feel that at least the latter (“users” and “sponsors” as their subspecies) are still not adequately educated and this fact helps the gap to survive. We discuss different views of this problem and advocate for some approaches, mainly based upon our own pedagogical experiences.

There are people who will probably find some of my remarks too “commercial” to be accepted by the scientific community. It may be so, but we live in a world of smart marketing. The analyses of the current state (like [7] and [11]) indicate that we are losing our customers, so far mainly in the area of education, but delayed consequences can appear sooner or later. One of the main reasons for this is obviously bad positioning of our product: we still try to sell T-bone steaks to vegetarians. Either the product or the customers must change. Anyway, the customer is always right.