Presidents' Symposium: The Current Missionary Role of OR/MS

A major role of operations research and management science has always been to provide “missionaries” to bring system perspectives, modeling, and analysis to those “heathen” professions that have not yet been “converted.” Since many of our traditional fields have already become self-sufficient, in the future our future attention should be directed at the more complex fields of organization theory and public policy, which have considerable needs and thus offer rich opportunities.