INFORMS Business Analytics 2014 Blog Posts

Earlier this year, I attended the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics & Operations Research, in Boston. I was asked beforehand if I wanted to be a conference blogger, and for some reason I said I would. This meant I was able to publish posts on the conference’s WordPress web site, and was also obliged to do so!

Here are the five posts that I wrote, along with an excerpt from each. Please click through to read the full pieces:

Operations Research, from the point of view of Data Science

• more insight, less action — deliverables tend towards predictions and storytelling, versus formal optimization
• more openness, less big iron — open source software leads to a low-cost, highly flexible approach
• more scruffy, less neat — data science technologies often come from black-box statistical models, vs. domain-based theory
• more velocity, smaller projects — a hundred $10K projects beats one $1M project
• more science, less engineering — both practitioners and methods have different backgrounds
• more hipsters, less suits — stronger connections to the tech industry than to the boardroom
• more rockstars, less teams — one person can now (roughly) do everything, in simple cases, for better or worse

What is a “Data Product”?

DJ Patil says “a data product is a product that facilitates an end goal through the use of data.” So, it’s not just an analysis, or a recommendation to executives, or an insight that leads to an improvement to a business process. It’s a visible component of a system. LinkedIn’s People You May Know is viewed by many millions of customers, and it’s based on the complex interactions of the customers themselves.

Healthcare (and not Education) at INFORMS Analytics

[A]s a DC resident, we often hear of “Healthcare and Education” as a linked pair of industries. Both are systems focused on social good, with intertwined government, nonprofit, and for-profit entities, highly distributed management, and (reportedly) huge opportunities for improvement. Aside from MIT Leaders for Global Operations winning the Smith Prize (and a number of shoutouts to academic partners and mentors), there was not a peep from the education sector at tonight’s awards ceremony. Is education, and particularly K-12 and postsecondary education, not amenable to OR techniques or solutions?

What’s Changed at the Practice/Analytics Conference?

In 2011, almost every talk seemed to me to be from a Fortune 500 company, or a large nonprofit, or a consulting firm advising a Fortune 500 company or a large nonprofit. Entrepeneurship around analytics was barely to be seen. This year, there are at least a few talks about Hadoop and iPhone apps and more. Has the cost of deploying advanced analytics substantially dropped?

Why OR/Analytics People Need to Know About Database Technology

It’s worthwhile learning a bit about databases, even if you have no decision-making authority in your organization, and don’t feel like becoming a database administrator (good call). But by getting involved early in the data-collection process, when IT folks are sitting around a table arguing about platform questions, you can get a word in occasionally about the things that matter for analytics — collecting all the data, storing it in a way friendly to later analytics, and so forth.

All in all, I enjoyed blogging the conference, and recommend the practice to others! It’s a great way to organize your thoughts and to summarize and synthesize your experiences.