I’m excited to announce DecisionFest: A series of virtual sessions we’re hosting in early December. DecisionFest features industry leaders and practitioners in the decision science space sharing observations and experiences on successfully operationalizing decision models in industry. We’re thrilled to have panelists from organizations such as IKEA, Walmart, Carvana, Toyota, Grubhub, Hertz, NFI, and more.
As with any discipline, connecting with other practitioners can change how you work, approach everyday problems, or face a challenge. You learn something new. You carry a new perspective. You don’t feel as alone.
We want to help amplify this effect for decision science and operations research. I’ve had the privilege of connecting with practitioners up and down the decision model value chain in sessions on modeling a problem, new algorithm research, solver improvements, and (more recently) LLM and GenAI applications. I’ve learned loads and continue to learn from and with these amazing OR voices.
What hasn’t received as much stage time is all the stuff (for lack of a better word) around the decision models: the software engineering, trust building, and project agility aspects required to successfully realize decision model value.
As a recent Feasible post noted, “The future of OR isn’t just better models, it’s better operations around those models.” And I couldn’t agree more. DecisionFest is an effort to more proactively highlight this in the setting of practitioner panels. To focus on exploring the How rather than just the What of the decision optimization we create: How to build trust in the solutions, how to get your model live, and how you can advocate for OR within your org.
In the spirit of all first initiatives: We’ll be listening for and welcoming of your constructive feedback. We’re looking to be mindful of time zones, session format and interaction, and content and topics. And whatever we don’t get entirely right this time around, we’ll look to improve in the future.
I hope you register for some (or all!) of the DecisionFest sessions. If you can’t attend a session live, register anyway and we’ll email you the recording when it’s available. We’re excited to make this forum available to the community this year and hope you’ll participate!
May your solutions be ever improving 🖖
