Perspectives on MS Applications---All Around the Model

“Planning and decision making,” management scientists are fond of saying, “are the objectives of management science application.” These are the words which we hear over and over in the pursuit of daily life of the typical management scientist. And they are certainly true. But what should be our goals, organizationally, in order that management science have the greatest effect on planning and decision making in the organizations we serve? The possibilities are many. Management science literature is replete with impassioned exhortations for getting management science techniques to the highest levels of management. Our ultimate objective, it would appear, is that an elite management science group sit at the right-hand of the chief executive ready to advise on all major issues of concern. This concept of the ultimate objective of management science was common in the late fifties and early sixties.Others have suggested that perhaps our objective ought to be not as advisors to the chief executive, but to be the chief decision making instrument of the organization itself. This concept also was fairly common in earlier days.Let us now look realistically from our current vantage point, the mid-seventies, at what our objectives might reasonably be, and where management science can ultimately hope to go in the typical organization.