During this time, involvement with ASOR (including a term as national president in 1979-80) required participation in many impassioned debates on such basic questions as the meaning of operations research, the future of the OR profession, and its relevance to the organisations in which it was practised.
Since then, the speaker has spent almost twenty years as a line manager in an information technology services organisation, with virtually no involvement in anything entitled OR or MS. Over this period, he has seen from a distance the demise of most if not all of the commercial operations research groups in this country.
When asked to address this conference, he thought it might be useful, stimulating and perhaps cathartic to revisit those basic questions. In doing so, he will attempt to look critically at OR from a number of different perspectives, and compare its development and current status with a number of other disciplines including information systems and quality management. Some irreverent and possibly controversial views on both management and management consultants will be presented.
Finally, with both humility and presumption, he will share his thoughts on how OR/MS can ensure its relevance to the organisations it seeks to serve as we move into the 21st Century.