Informs Today: The Podcast Series

Like it or not, the Affordable Care Act – dubbed Obamacare by detractors and supporters alike – will become the law of the land in the United States in less than a year. How are hospitals beginning to cope with important data management requirements? How are healthcare analytics professionals guiding hospital administrators as they prepare for a brave new future? Listen to former INFORMS President President Don Kleinmuntz of Strata Decision Technology explore the growing role of analytics and hospital management in this broad-ranging interview recorded at the 2013 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics.

One of the challenges for an expert in any specialized field is explaining highly technical information to internal and external clients. This has been a longstanding problem for consultants in analytics and operations research who work with business people who can’t understand the field’s highly mathematical framework. At the 2013 INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research Carrie Beam of Carrie Beam Consulting. gave a workshop with solid advice for analytics consultants who need to find a common language with clients. Afterward, she sat down to record this useful podcast. Listen and learn.

In an era when unstructured data from video and other formats is becoming increasingly available for examination, the power of analytics to yield important recommendations is growing. In a column published in the current issue of the INFORMS publication Analytics Magazine, Atanu Basu of Ayata provides valuable advice on using prescriptive analytics. In his second Science of Better podcast, hear him provide some essentials tips.

English physicist Patrick Blackett had served in the Royal Navy during WWI, leaving to study physics at Cambridge. He brought both experiences to his development of operations research on behalf of the United Kingdom, fighting against a devastating sea campaign that threatened to cripple his country’s economy. In Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare, author Stephen Buidansky tells the story of Blackett, also highlighting the contributions of American Philip Morse. Listen to this fascinating interview with Stephen Budiansky about one of the inventors of operations research.

Sure operations research and analytics are connected. But when it comes down to professional skills - the hard technical skills and the soft skills that business people need - how similar, and different are practitioners of the two? In a new examination of a survey completed by INFORMS members that appears in the March issue of the INFORMS journal Interfaces, Matthew Liberatore and Wenhong Luo of Villanova University highlight differences in hard skills and similarities in soft business skills. Hear them clearly define the two professions in this enlightening podcast.

Some Americans might find relief and delight in eliminating TV ads from presidential campaigns. But the effect of advertising, especially in close contests, can be important enough to put the best advertiser in the White House. Brett R. Gordon of Columbia University and Wesley R. Hartmann looked at the campaigns of 2000 and 2004 in their study, Advertising Effects in Presidential Elections, which appears in the current issue of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science. Hear them explain the subtle distinctions between product advertising and political advertising, and how one advertising campaign was key to winning office.

Big Data is creating big opportunities – and also big challenges for executives and managers at companies who have decided to make an investment in analytics software but need guidance making an expensive choice among varied solutions.Michael Gualtieri, the Principal Analyst serving Application Development and Delivery Professionals at Forrester Research, is the principle author in a Forrester report entitled The Forrester Wave: Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions Q1 2013. Hear him preview the report in this podcast.

If you're in government, product marketing, or any field that craves insight into what the public feels, you probably use sentiment analysis, which assesses whether an article or blog entry or online review is positive, negative, or neutral and draws macro conclusions from all the data. But developing an algorithm or model to understand the nuance of language is still a skill in its infancy. Maksim Tsvetovat of Deepmile Networks and George Mason University believes that current methods have serious flaws. He offers a unique approach in Implicit Sentiment Mining, an article he co-authored with Jacqueline Kazil and Alex Kouznetsov. It appears in the current issue of ORMS Today. You'll gain insight into the current state and the future promise of sentiment analytics in this insightful podcast.

The traditional method of brainstorming is great for generating ideas - up to a point. With its time limit and lack of guidance to participants, some ideas don't get expressed, so they can't be considered when decision time comes along. INFORMS decision analysis pioneer Ralph Keeney, Professor Emeritus at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, makes his recommendations about improving the brainstorming process in his study Value-Focused Brainstorming, which appears in the current issue of Decision Analysis. He explains his important new method in this revealing podcast.

If you discovered a technology that could increase your return on assets by as much as 15% wouldn’t you adopt it? Surprisingly, a minority of Fortune 1000 companies actually target their customers and make better decisions using analytics in their marketing decisions. Gary L.Lilien, a leading force in the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science and former president of the INFORMS predecessor society TIMS, explains the surprising results in an upcoming study, Performance Implications of Marketing Analytics, co-authored by Arvind Rangaswamy and Frank Germann.

Big Data is becoming a source of new insights, growth, profit, and better customer service – for organizations that know how to use analytics to explain all that data. The IBM Institute for Business Value, together with the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, issued a white paper, "Analytics: The real-world use of Big Data. How innovative enterprises extract value from uncertain data." Listen to Michael Schroeck, a partner and vice president for IBM Global Business Services, as he explains the important findings.

Pollsters predict a neck-and-neck contest between President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Governor Mitt Romney on Election Day. So why are two operations researchers so confident that President Obama can't lose? In this podcast, listen to American University Professor Allan Lichtman, author of Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House 2012, and University of Illinois Professor Sheldon Jacobson, whose election forecasting website is at http://electionanalytics.cs.illinois.edu/index.html. More about their methods is in an upcoming issue of ORMS Today and an article by Doug Samuelson in the current issue of Analytics Magazine. You can hear them in person at the 2012 INFORMS Annual Meeting at this special workshop.

Michael Lewis may have created a sensation around sports analytics in his bestseller and the movie starring Brad Pitt, but there's a much bigger story to be told. Interfaces, the INFORMS journal, has published a two-part issue devoted to ways that math modeling can improve performance and the business of sports. The previous issue of the journal was devoted to a range of O.R. sports research and the current issue is devoted to sports scheduling. Listen to co-editors Michael Fry of the University of Cincinnati and Jeffrey Ohlmann of the University of Iowa talk about measuring driving and putting excellence in golf, improving baseball player drafts, why goalies rule, and more.

Moving to a pay per click system in online advertising, especially if that means pay per sale, was meant to reduce the cost of ads and make the whole system more efficient. Then why does the system actually lower revenue and profits? In his June, 2012 study in the INFORMS journal Management Science, Chrysanthos Dellarocas of Boston University explains the phenomenon of double marginalization - and how he would fix it.

Almost half the industry leaders cited in the 1982 best-seller "In Search of Excellence" no longer exist or are badly underperforming. What goes into the decline of a company? And how does shortsightedness in the application of analytics contribute to these kinds of downfalls? Listen to SAS consultant Gary Cokins, the author of "Why Do Large, Once-Successful Companies Fail?" in the current issue of Analytics Magazine and a piece about the obstacle course for analytics that appeared earlier this year in ORMS Today as he casts light on the make or break power of analytics.

American manufacturing is doing better than many pundits credit, and it can grow still further - but will American policymakers take the steps needed? Or will the glory days when America was the "Arsenal of Democracy," fade further still? The University of Michigan's Tauber Institute for Global Operations and Booz & Co. collaborated on a report, Manufacturing's Wake-Up Call. Listen to former Management Science editor-in-chief Wally Hopp and Tauber co-director Roman Kapuscinski in this look at the American economy from the perspective of two respected management scientists.

Experts in analytics and operations research have long argued that you cannot properly understand a phenomenon unless you can apply metrics that explain it in numbers. U.S. Army Major Rob Dees strongly believes that this concept also applies to the Department of Defense obtaining and retaining the best fighting men and women. A researcher for the Mayo Clinic and speaker at a session during this month's INFORMS Conference on Analytics, Major Dees speaks at length in this podcast recorded at the INFORMS Huntington Beach conference.

In the B2B environment, social media has risen to a whole new importance for marketers. In a preview of her presentation at the 2012 INFORMS Conference on Analytics this April, Theresa Kushner, the Senior Director of Customer Intelligence at Cisco, explains how Cisco is going beyond analyzing traditional online metrics to better understand its customers and retain market share in an increasingly competitive environment. Hear her discuss Connecting the Stars: Applying Social Media Understanding to a Structured Marketing Data Environment in a B2B World.

It's spring, and a young man's fancy turns to, well, um, college basketball. Operations researchers are here to make sure your heart's desire (winning your office pool) comes true. Sheldon Jacobson of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign returns this year to share his approach to bracketology, the forecasting of odds in the NCAA Men's Division Basketball Championship. Listen to him and visit his website at bracketodds.cs.illinois.edu. You can even revisit his 2011 appearance with Georgia Tech's Joel Sokol by clicking here.

Women are finally beginning to rise above the barriers that once kept them from leadership in major organizations. How does the new generation of women leaders differ from their male counterparts? From women in the general population? In today's podcast, Renée Adams of the University of New South Wales and Patricia Funk of Universitat Pompeau Fabra and Barcelona Graduate School of Economics discuss their new study, Beyond the Glass Ceiling: Does Gender Matter?, which appears in the current issue of the INFORMS journal Management Science.