EJOR Analytics Review.pdf (814.68 kB)
Operational research from Taylorism to Terabytes: a research agenda for the analytics age
journal contribution
posted on 2015-01-13, 09:35 authored by Michael J. Mortenson, Neil Doherty, Stewart RobinsonThe growing attention and prominence afforded to analytics presents a genuine challenge for the operational research community. Many in the community have recognised this growth and sought to align themselves with analytics. For instance, the US operational research society INFORMS now offers analytics related conferences, certification and a magazine. However, as shown in this research, the volume of analytics-orientated studies in journals associated with operational research is comparatively low. This paper seeks to address this paradox by seeking to better understand what analytics is, and how operational research is related to it. To do so literature from a range of academic disciplines is analysed, in what is conceived as concurrent histories in the shared tradition of a management paradigm spread over the last 100 years. The findings of this analysis reveal new insights as to how operational research exists within an ecosystem shared with several other disciplines, and how interactions and ripple effects diffuse knowledge and ideas between each. Whilst this ecosystem is developed and evolved through interdisciplinary collaborations, individual disciplines are cast into competition for the attention of the same business users. These findings are further explored by discussing the implication this has for operational research, as well as considering what directions future research may take to maximise the potential value of these relationships.
Funding
This work was part-funded and supported by the Operational Research Society, as part of the ongoing charitable project titled: Is Operational Research in UK Universities ‘Fit-for-Purpose’ for the Growing Field of Analytics.
History
School
- Business and Economics
Department
- Business
Published in
European Journal of Operational ResearchVolume
241Issue
3Pages
583 - 595Citation
MORTENSON, M.J., DOHERTY, N.F. and ROBINSON, S., 2015. Operational research from Taylorism to Terabytes: a research agenda for the analytics age. European Journal of Operational Research, 241 (3), pp.583-595.Publisher
Elsevier (© The Authors)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 International (CC BY 3.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Publication date
2014-09-04Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier as Open Access at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2014.08.029ISSN
0377-2217Publisher version
Language
- en