Cooperation between strands of practice: challenges and opportunities for the renewal of OR
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#1998 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/98 $12.00
Cooperation between strands of practice: challenges and opportunities for the renewal of OR WJAM Overmeer1, CJ Corbett2 and LN Van Wassenhove3 1
New York University, 2The Anderson School at UCLA, USA and 3INSEAD, Fontainbleau, France
Collaboration between OR groups following different `strands of practice', namely adhering to different ways of conducting OR practice, is dif®cult. We demonstrate the existence of this problem in two contexts. Firstly, we found several different strands of practice within an independent, entrepreneurial OR ®rm. Though these strands had the potential to be highly complementary, their co-existence within one ®rm led to serious tensions and their potential synergy has not yet been realised. When the independent OR ®rm achieved successful renewal by transforming one of their strands of practice into a new approach to projects, this very success created a new set of competitive challenges. Secondly, an independent OR consulting ®rm working with a client's internal research group found that the latter's approach con¯icted with its own, resulting in an unsuccessful project. We conclude that the `micro-level' problems of collaboration between individual practitioners and between groups, though largely neglected in the OR literature, can be serious impediments to success and renewal of OR practice. Keywords: consultancy; methodology of OR; practice of OR
Introduction Participants at the Bowness Conference depicted a complex pattern of change in the practice of OR. Instead of calling the change yet another `crisis' or seeing it as the result of `a natural drift' of the profession,1 its participants (including a number of practitioners and academics who helped frame the debates in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as a new crop of academics and heads of large European and American OR groups) identi®ed a major shift in the environment in which OR is conducted. In the 1960s and 1970s, OR had mainly been conducted through large, internal and centralised OR departments in sizeable organisations (private and public). By the early 1990s, however, these traditional clients of OR work had started to restructure their organisations by `downsizing' head of®ces, decentralising decision making, and outsourcing work. Sometimes central in-house OR groups were reduced in size, or `privatised'. Sometimes parts of these groups were decentralised in an effort to bring them closer to the internal clients and made part of independent business units, a development also described by Geoffrion.2 The net result of this restructuring of large organisations is an emerging network of OR groups. In such a network, external entrepreneurial OR groups may conduct projects with central in-house OR groups or with OR groups located in business units. Such external groups may also approach clients in large organisations directly. We have observed
Correspondence: Dr CJ Corbett, The Anderson School at ULCA, 110 Westwood Plaza, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 9009
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