- Business Intelligence (5)
- Education (1)
- INFORMS (2)
- Intechné (4)
- Methodology (4)
- Operations Research (14)
- optimization (1)
- Probability Management (2)
- Risk (5)
- software (1)
- Teaching (1)
- Vision (4)
- 25 April 2010: Progress in Probability Management
- 8 March 2009: Searching for Answers to Life’s Persistent Questions
- 6 March 2009: INFORMS 1.5
- 27 February 2009: Orthogonal Skills
- 18 February 2009: The Science of Better Search
- 13 February 2009: Living in Interesting Times
- 4 February 2009: Remembering the Master of All Trades
- 30 January 2009: Less is More
- 16 January 2009: Certifiably Analytic
- 9 January 2009: Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy, they First Call Risk-Protected
Probability Management
In recent weeks I have been working with Sam Savage, well-known OR personality and a consulting professor at Stanford. We’re focusing on developing a practice framework for Probability Management. Whazzat, you ask? In sum, Probability Management is all about robust decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. (Pretty much the vision for Intechné!)
Since real world decision problems are almost always ill-structured and fuzzy, our tools of choice belong to the worlds of simulation, and statistical visualization. Stochastic optimization plays a role too, but in a very different form than typically understood, say, in Operations Research circles. In general, we are not interested in creating IT systems that generate “best possible” recommendations. Rather, we enable managers to interactively explore the decision space of good solutions, using something similar to a business intelligence (BI) approach. The key difference between BI and Probability Management is that while BI is essentially descriptive (identifying multi-factorial relationships, typically for historical data) Probability Management is prescriptive: our clients learn what to do better.
I intend to write further on this topic, but for now let me point interested readers to our newly redesigned web site. The organization is a loose consortium of academic and commercial folks involved in the field, as vendors, users, and advisors. Check out the Interact! tab. It contains illustrative Excel models that describe the relevant concepts far better than long-winded descriptions. If you find it interesting and wish to discuss further, contact me.