From the Editor: Is Interfaces Meeting Its Mission?

In his President’s Column in the April 2009 issue or OR/MS Today, INFORMS President Don Kleinmuntz discusses our lack of success as a society in reaching out to practitioners (Kleinmuntz 2009). He mentions that in 2006, the US Department of Labor Statistics estimated that 58,000 individuals were working in operations research (and perhaps another 3 million in closely related fields). However, INFORMS has only about 2,500 practitioner members. I share Don’s concern and believe that we (INFORMS) should aspire to achieve a higher market share of operations researchers in industry, not-for-profit organizations, and government. We need to consider ways to increase our practitioner membership. To this end, INFORMS reaches out to practitioners through its Practice Meeting, the Practice Section, the Roundtable, and the publication of Interfaces and OR/MS Today. In his column, Don questions whether Interfaces is meeting its stated mission: “Interfaces seeks to improve communication between managers and professionals in OR/MS and to inform the academic community about practice.” Don and I have discussed this, and I believe it is the first part of this mission that he questions. I believe that we are improving communication between managers and professionals of OR/MS if both are reading Interfaces. For example, Glenn Wegryn, who manages an OR group at Procter & Gamble, might read an article written by Thomas Olavson of Hewlett-Packard and Chris Fry of Strategic Management Solutions (Olavson and Fry 2008), and take what he learns from the article to his group. Likewise, we occasionally include articles on how to manage OR groups so that an OR manager can communicate to other professionals what he or she learns. Nigam (2008) is an example. Thus, one can argue that Interfaces is indeed meeting both parts of its mission. The bread and butter of Interfaces has been and will continue to be examples of successful applications of operations research. Each year, we publish the finalists of the Edelman and Wagner competitions. We publish contributed columns, such as the Art and Science of Practice, the Ombudsman, and the Fifth Column, as well as Practice Abstracts and Book Reviews. We also occasionally include articles on controversial subjects (see Armstrong et al. 2008) and on lessons learned in the field (see Brown and Rosenthal 2008). Nonetheless, Don’s comments caused me to seriously ponder what is missing and how we might broaden the mix of the types of papers in Interfaces. In the past, Interfaces has published tutorials. The Lagrangian relaxation tutorial by Fisher (1985) is an excellent example of a very useful tutorial and is one of the most cited papers to have appeared in Interfaces. I have used it in the classroom for many years. We seem also to have gotten away from publishing surveys. If you have an idea for a tutorial or survey paper, send me an e-mail with a proposal. With this issue, Ron Fricker of the Naval Postgraduate School joins the board as contributing editor. He accepted my invitation to continue the rankings of university contributions to the OR practice literature that Mike Rothkopf started. The first ranking under Ron will appear in the November–December 2009 issue. We have decided to expand this a bit and, to Don Kleinmuntz’s point, also acknowledge