Towards user-friendly OR: a Chinese experience
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Towards user-friendly OR: a Chinese experience Z Zhu1* 1
Hull University Business School, UK
In contemporary China, user-friendliness has become not only a necessity for the success of OR projects but also a must for the survival of OR workers. This paper presents an approach that, based upon insights from Chinese thought as well as OR/MS experience in the Chinese context since the 1950s, can be useful for improving user-friendliness in the OR process. The paper also reports a real-world project in which OR workers pursue the user-friendliness of their work under the guidance of these insights and approach. A cultural analysis suggests that, while user-friendly OR is a universal concern, the Eastern and Western ways of tackling the issue appear different. The paper concludes that, in reality, Chinese OR workers must enhance their vision and skills so as to solve sociotechnical problems with diverse methods and do so in a user-friendly manner. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2002) 53, 137–148. DOI: 10.1057=sj=jors=2601073 Keywords: practice of OR; process of OR; methodology; developing countries
Introduction Do we need to be concerned with the user-friendliness of the OR process and, if so, how can OR be made more userfriendly? These are the questions this paper is to discuss. The discussion will be contextualised in the contemporary social–cultural setting of China, where the OR environment and practice have changed dramatically in recent years and where this author comes from. The paper will begin with a presentation of the background, suggesting that user-friendliness has nowadays become not only a necessity for the success of OR projects but also increasingly a must for the survival of OR workers under the reform-open policy in China. This will be followed by an illustration of a recently developed Chinese approach, its cultural roots and its methodology, that can be useful for making the OR process more user-friendly. The paper will then move on to report a real-world project, in which OR workers enhanced its user-friendliness by encouraging and facilitating users’ participation and creativity. Finally the paper will present a cultural analysis of the Chinese approach and experience, reflecting on limitations and challenges OR workers have to tackle in their pursuit of user-friendly OR. Why user-friendly OR? In this paper, ‘user’ is defined to mean not only the owners or operators of the final delivery of OR projects but also *Correspondence: Zhichang Zhu, Hull University Business School (HUBS), University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
participants who may be involved in the OR process for various reasons, eg to initiate projects, to put forward requirements, to raise issues, to negotiate objectives, to set criteria, to contribute expertise, to provide data, to allocate funding, to acquire resources, etc., as well as those who may play multiple roles, for exampl
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