August 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 4

Getting Connected

By Mohan Sodhi


Success is a function of not only who you know, but also what you know. Fortunately, the Internet and online services -- both part of "cyberspace" -- can help you "meet" other operations research professionals online and learn about OR-related issues. While I am sure cyberspace will become an important part of our lives in the foreseeable future, I am not sure it will necessarily be the Internet, so this column is titled more generally "cyberspace," a word introduced by William Gibson in his dark novel, "Neuromancer."

There is a need to make sense of this new technology that has burst upon the world, and to see what makes sense for OR practice. Certainly, the Internet and online services are everywhere and those of us who are not already connected are under the pressure to do so by colleagues and by the high-pressure marketing campaigns of the online services.

This new world order is chaotic. On one hand there is so much going on that you just want to say, "Stop the world and let me off." On the other hand, there is so much hype that no one wants to take a chance on missing the boat. Sometimes it seems as if Microsoft and Hollywood have already taken over cyberspace. Maybe, as someone said in a conference recently, the Internet is like teenage sex everyone is talking about it, very little is actually happening, and when it is happening, it is probably unsafe anyway!

This column targets OR practitioners interested in safe cybersurfing while addressing such cyberspace issues as how and why OR practitioners should get connected, and what is happening of note to OR practice. My personal goal is to get the OR community to concentrate on using and/or building a few useful resources in cyberspace; not to encourage scattered efforts on every new cyberspace technology (Java, virtual reality, multimedia on the Web, etc.) when there are more important issues of simply getting connected, using existing resources fruitfully, and creating new services that need to be addressed.


Why OR Practitioners Need Access
As with anything else in life, getting connected to cyberspace is a great solution, but we must find the question first. So, instead of trying to figure out which online service to join, or which Internet provider to call, we should first try to figure what we are trying to accomplish. Why do we need access to cyberspace as OR practitioners? As I already mentioned, getting connected can get us both ingredients of success -- networking with people and information. Moreover, for OR, many efforts are already underway by INFORMS and academic groups to provide Internet-based services to the OR community at large using the Internet. Some of these are listed below. Details will follow in future columns. An article in Interfaces [Sodhi 1995] provides a guide to the Internet for OR professionals.

Internet-based services of interest to the OR community: