analytics killed the “operations research” star

I really enjoyed a recent post on Güzin Bayraksan’s OR Blog, where she examines the possibility of an OR/MS “recession” by examining recent trends of searching for the terms “operations research” and “management science” in search engines.  In the true OR/MS spirit, Dr. Bayraksan uses google trend search to collect and examine the data herself.

I reproduced the key figure from Dr. Bayraksan’s blog post, but check out the post for yourself.   She speculates on whether analytics is killing OR, and there is probably some truth to that.  I hope our blogs can revive OR somewhat.

…In my mind and in my OR, we can’t rewind we’ve gone to far.
the Science of Better played our hand, but Analytics came and took our brand …