To charge or not to charge?
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#1998 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/98 $12.00
To charge or not to charge? S Eilon Imperial College, London Discussions on the success or failure of OR practice tend to focus on speci®c case studies which often highlight major dilemmas that face OR professionals: Model robustness, simplicity vs complexity, optimising vs satis®cing, con¯ict between criteria, who is the `client'?, and so on. But above all, the following issues predominate: Should OR be concerned with tactical or strategic problems? Where should it be placed in the organisational structure and who should it report to? These issues inevitably raise the questions of accountability, coupled with that of charging for OR services. It is this issue in particular, whether to charge or not to charge for OR services, that the paper seeks to explore. Keywords: OR practice; management of OR; strategic OR; tactical OR; accountability; charging for OR
Introduction Life at the top of the managerial hierarchy in industry is becoming increasingly complex. The effects of the global market place, increasing competition, changing government policies regarding regulation, the pace of technical change, particularly in the area of telecommunications and information technology, these are just some of the external forces that have characterised the dynamics of the business world in recent years and will continue to reshape it for many years to come. Much has been written about the decision making process and a review of the literature would not be appropriate here, but a historical note and relevant references can be found in an anthology of Management Science compiled by Eilon1 (see the preface and Part I). Suf®ce it to say, that many prominent OR scholars have devoted a great deal of effort to examining and analysing this process and relating it to the OR problem solving activity. The early writings of Herbert Simon2 are good examples of his concern to highlight decision making as an integral part of socio-economic systems, and so were the writings of West Churchman3 and those of Russ Ackoff.4±6 It is notable that Simon's in¯uential book `Administrative Behavior'2 was written as long ago as 1961 and that, with the help of a galaxy of collaborators, he returned to the subject of decision making and problem solving 26 years later (Simon et al7). These publications (and many others in this vein) postulate explicitly or implicitly that the services of OR are designed to aid the decision making process of management. In days gone-by management consultants used to say that faced with the need to solve managerial problems, senior executives must start with a de®nition of their objectives
Correspondence: Prof S Eilon, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College, London, SW7 2BX
and that such a step is at least half way to ®nding a solution. But as I remarked elsewhere (Eilon8±10), such an assertion is somewhat simplistic. Firstly, as indicated in Table 1, it is rare for the aspirations of an organisation to be encapsulated in a single obj
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