Distinctive Competencies
In my vision statement for the INFORMS election, I indicated that I would collaborate with the INFORMS Board and staff on several activities. The first activity that I listed is:
Determine the distinctive competencies of INFORMS as a professional organization, as compared to other organizations. What makes INFORMS different from organizations such as the Institute for Industrial Engineers (ISIE), American Statistical Association (ASA), American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Decision Sciences Institute (DSI), and other similar organizations?
What do I mean by “distinctive competencies?” In 1999, while I was a product manager for ILOG, I took a Product Marketing course (https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/product/course/foundations/) from Pragmatic Marketing (https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/). This course opened my eyes to the importance of being market driven. It is crucial to identify and listen to the entire market. I also learned about the concept of “distinctive competencies” of a company, which is defined as “the characteristics of a company that differentiate it from its competitors.” You can read more about this concept at https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/product/framework/distinctive-competencies/ . What makes INFORMS different from the other organizations listed above?
All these organizations publish journals and have conferences. They all have members magazines and professional staff. Here are a few things that I believe that INFORMS does that differentiate us from these organizations:
INFORMS created and maintains the Certified Analytics Professional (CAP) certification (https://www.certifiedanalytics.org/).
INFORMS recognizes excellence in applications of our field via the annual Franz Edelman Award competition (https://www.informs.org/Recognizing-Excellence/INFORMS-Prizes/Franz-Edelman-Award ), which has documented over $400 billion in cost savings, increased revenues and profits, not to mention the countless number of lives saved by innovative applications of operations research, analytics, management science, economics, behavioral science, statistics, artificial intelligence, data science, applied mathematics, and other relevant fields.
INFORMS has a diverse set of sections and societies that cover both a variety of methodologies in our field, as well as application areas covering a wide set of industries.
I’m sure that there are other differentiators as well. I hope to discover more of them if I am elected.
As INFORMS looks to attract new members, we need to emphasize our distinctive competencies so that potential membership prospects believe that these differences are worth affiliating with our professional society. This is foundational to creating products and services that resonate with these prospects so that we can grow our membership and be THE home for all of those who teach, learn, and practice the techniques of our field.