Jennifer Priestley

DSc 9200

November 6, 2001

 

  1. Paper Selected – “Post-modern Management Science: A likely convergence of Soft Computing and Knowledge Management methods” Publication is TBD.

 

  1. Thomas Whalen and Subhashish Samaddar

 

  1. What is next for the discipline of Management Science?

 

  1. Basic Theoretical – The authors posit “What’s Next” for the discipline of Management Science.  

 

  1. The authors define the traditional discipline of Management Science in terms of four key organizing questions (Whats best? Whats Next? What if? Whats my best bet?), and the traditional “hard” techniques that support the development of answers to these questions (LP, Simulation, Time Series, Game Theory).  They then explain that in some ways Management Science has become a victim of its own success as individuals with very little expertise or mathematical grounding can use spreadsheet-based tools to accomplish the level of analysis that would have been unattainable prior to the ubiquity of the personal computer.  The authors conclude the paper with proposing the concepts and “soft” techniques that will evolve as the next generation of the discipline.  Specifically, Knowledge Management and Fuzzy Computing.  

 

  1. Anyone with a brain should find this article interesting.  J