Behavioral Science—Measuring the Immeasurable or Credibility in the Public Sector

Saul Gass, writing as president of ORSA, identified a central concern for the OR/MS field. He referred to “the difficulties that have been encountered in developing and implementing decision and other models for the federal government.” His specific finding was that far less than half of the models (supported by the federal government and costing several hundreds of millions of dollars) were used in decision-making.

Gass next raised the related and more general problem, “what can the OR profession do to cause decision models to be more useful, more usable and of greater utility to the ultimate decision maker.” Then, in answer, he recommends a U. S. General Accounting Office publication which details a five-phase approach to model development. “These phases are: problem definition, preliminary design, detail design, evaluation, and maintenance.”