How to Market OR/MS Decision Support

This research examines what to do to have decision makers more utilize OR/MS decision support. We investigate OR/MS decision support from a new viewpoint of service. Firstly, based on the fact that what is provided by OR/MS decision support is information to aid in decision making, we show that OR/MS decision support shares characteristics with service, hence can be considered as a kind of service. Next, we analyze OR/MS decision support from the viewpoint of what is necessary for service of high quality, and we clarify the issue of communication gaps. If we investigate preceding research in OR/MS (Operations Research/Management Science), it turns out that there is surely a problem with communication gap between decision makers and decision supporters. Finally, we show that it is effective to utilize problem specification, which is a decision-maker-friendly description of problems proposed by research groups including the author, as one approach to bridge the communication gap.