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#1998 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/98 $12.00
Viewpoint Steve New's review1 of the Handbook of Systems Analysis: Cases. (HJ Miser (ed) is generally favourable, a fact that is much appreciated by the book's editor and contributors. Thus, it is a matter of regret that it is necessary to point out errors of fact in the review. In discussing the ®rst case in the book, an analysis of icebreaking operations in the northern Baltic, the reviewer quotes the analysts as saying `Actually the client did not seem very interested in the work and its results.' The ensuing discussion falsely attributes this state of affairs to the entire study: the reviewer overlooked reporting that this statement occurs in a paragraph describing only the ®rst phase of a four-phase study. In the chapter describing an analysis of whether or not the Government of Israel should undertake to manufacture a ®ghter plane, the reviewer attributes the authorship to Lavi, the name of the ®ghter. This, of course, was not correct: the author was Yehezkel Dror, a distinguished and well-known political scientist. About the content of the analysis that, over a ®ve-year period, helped Stanford University balance its budget, the reviewer says only that the authors `present an interesting tale of false starts and uncertainties,' thus creating the appearance that this relatively minor aspect of the work characterised it. Such a characterisation is false: In actual fact, the workÐwhich won the Lanchester Prize of the Operations Research Society of America in 1981Ðwas an exemplary close and markedly successful ®ve-year cooperation between the analysts and the University's administration. About a major systems analysis devoted to the issues arising in planning water resources in the Netherlands (the work won the Franz Edelman Award for Management Science Achievement in 1984), the reviewer says that `Goeller (the team leader) and his colleagues decline[d] to prescribe a solution, but instead toss[ed] a 4000 page report into `the Dutch political process' and let decisions about what to do emerge from that.' This characterisation of the content of the work and the relations between the analysis team and the client is false in a number of ways, of which I will mention two: ®rstly, there was no `4000 page report; to `toss' at the client; the analysts worked cooperatively with the client staff throughout the analysis, and made a comprehensive report on its ®ndings at a series of meetings. Secondly, the central focus of the analysis was to narrow the very wide scope of possible tactics and how they could be combined into strategies by showing by
analysis which were the most promising. The ®ndings then presented to the client were a carefully selected small number of attractive strategies. They all shared an important property: none were uniformly optimal with respect to all of the important variables that needed to be considered. Thus, there was important work for the political process to do: to decide what tradeoffs it wanted to make. The
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