Innovative Decisions, Inc.

May 17, 2008 - Freeman Marvin and Don Buckshaw were part of a team of experienced decision analysts who created and taught a new workshop at the INFORMS Practitioner’s Conference this year. The Soft-Skills Workshop provided participants with tools and techniques to use with individual decision-makers and with collaborative groups.

"Making Product Development (System Design) Decisions with Decision Analysis"
Presentation to INFORMS By Dennis Buede

The concept that design decisions get made by designers is common in the disciplines of product development and systems engineering. Yet more often than not these decisions are made without any formal analysis, often via an internal satisficing process. When the decision process is formal and explicit, there are many potential pitfalls, some of which are commonly known in the field of decision analysis and some of which are not. Formal decision processes during system design are commonly called trade studies or analyses of alternatives (AoAs). This paper will gave an overview of the process for systems engineering and product development, described the many kinds of trade studies that are undertaken, related decision analysis to these trade studies, and discussed the complexities of system design about which decision analysts should be aware.

Presentation to DAAG
By Bob Liebe

At the Decision Analysis Affinity Group conference in Baltimore, MD, Bob Liebe presented analysis IDI performed with analysts from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations addressing Antiterrorism/Force Protection Resource Allocation decisions. The analysis provided insights into risk-informed priorities for protection technology investments and also provided insights into low-risk manpower reductions. These efforts supported the Navy continued efforts to minimize risk to Navy mission, people, and assets in a cost-effective, efficient manner.

"Learning From Successes and Failures"
Presentation to DAAG By Gregory Parnell and Terry Bresnick

How should we learn from our decision analysis successes and failures? This presentation uses decision analysis concepts to assess past successes and failures. We identify the factors that increase the probability of success for future decision analyses.

"Getting the Budget to Yes, and with Effect; A Proven Process of Deliberative Resource Allocation"
Presentation to INFORMS and DAAG By Ken Kuskey

Peter Drucker advised, "Decisions of the kind the executive has to make ... are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views.... The first rule of decision making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement." Surely this is good advice, but is it feasible for annual budget-formulation decisions in government agencies? Such decisions have vast scope, perhaps thousands of new initiatives, and always shifting stakeholder demands. How can one generate and resolve conflicts practically for such decisions? This talk describes deliberative processes that work when there is a will to make good decisions, not just more decisions, and to increase mission impact, not just split the pie again. The talk covers
- A conceptual framework;
- Steps of the overall process; and
- Three uses of "deliberative decision analysis" to generate program guidance, measure preferences for budget initiatives, and select initiatives that maximize budget impact.

January 24, 2008 – IDI Senior Principal Dr. Dan Maxwell and Dr. Kathleen Carley of Carnegie-Mellon University have published the results of a study for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The IRS initiated the research program in 2004 to explore the feasibility of using multi-agent (agent based) simulations to help inform decision making about how to more effectively and efficiently administer the US tax system.

The study was part of a multi-faceted effort by the National Taxpayer Advocate, Nina E. Olson, to shed light on why taxpayers comply with the tax laws and what helps them comply. Dan’s work modeled Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) filing behavior in a recent state certification initiative. Ms. Olson wrote that the effort “looks at the burdens, barriers, and influences on taxpayers in filing, payment or compliance initiatives, and seeks to identify practices that would mitigate if not eliminate the burdens and barriers.”

The simulation team attempted to replicate an actual tax related event that occurred in the US population. The specific request was to recreate the IRS EITC Certification study experience in Hartford County, Connecticut, for tax year 2004. The project achieved three goals: to represent the diverse types of events that occur in a complex social environment, to demonstrate the ability to “tune” a simulation to reasonably approximate a real world experience, and to examine the relative impact of the diverse events that actually occurred as compared to other sequences of events that might have occurred (counterfactuals). Click on the link below to read the full study report:

Dr. Dennis Buede Appointed to the Advisory Board for George Mason University's SEOR Department

November 2, 2007 - Dennis Buede was appointed this week to the Advisory Board for GMU's Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department. The appointment is for the 2007-2008 term. The 13 member board provides independent advice and perspective for the department chair and faculty of the highly respected academic institution. Located in northern Virginia, George Mason University is at the forefront of the nation's "new generation" of innovative state universities.

September 5, 2007 — IDI founders Dennis Buede and Terry Bresnick have co-authored a chapter in the newly published book from Cambridge University Press entitled, Advances in Decision Analysis: From Foundations to Applications. The book, edited by the legendary Ward Edwards, Ralph F. Miles, Jr. and Detlof von Winterfeldt, provides a valuable overview of the current state of the art of decision analysis. Dennis and Terry wrote the chapter, “Applications of Decision Analysis to the Military Systems Acquisition Process,” to show how the use of decision analytic techniques has played a key role in US military weapons programs. They illustrate their point with five examples involving Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps programs. The chapter on military applications, like the book itself, reflects the extensive experience of the authors in applying decision analysis to a variety of hard problems. The book can be found online at www.amazon.com.

IDI Presents at Military Operations Research Society Symposium

June 29, 2007 - IDI staff members presented their recent technical work at the 75th Military Operations Research Society Symposium held at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Attending the symposium this year were (left to right) Russ Mosier, Bob Liebe, Gary Smith, Don Buckshaw and Freeman Marvin. Also attending were Dan Maxwell and Greg Parnell (not shown).

Greg Parnell provided a well attended presentation titled “Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Decision Support Frameworks for Department of Defense Analyses.” The presentation described the major Value-Focused Thinking/ Multiple Objective Decision Analysis pitfalls and best practices to avoid the pitfalls. A paper written will IDI colleagues Robin Dillon and Don Buckshaw will appear in Military Operations Research. You can contract Greg for a copy of the paper at gparnell@innovativedecisions.com.

Greg Parnell weighs the options for dinner at the Maryland Crab Feast on the second evening of the symposium. MORS events provide not only an excellent professional development program, but an opportunity to meet new colleagues while enjoying the local color.

June 22, 2007 - Greg Parnell and a team from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point published their recent analysis of Army installation regions in the May-June 2007 issue of Interfaces. They analyzed the regional organization of the Installation Management Agency (IMA) to determine the best number of regions needed to manage effectively. Using a classic decision analytic approach, Greg and the other team members conducted extensive stakeholder interviews, created a Value Hierarchy of key functions and sub-functions, generated feasible alternative structures, and assessed how well each agency structure would perform. The result was a confirmation of the existing four-region structure, saving the Army from a costly restructuring of the agency.

Interfaces is a professional journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). For more information, go to: http://interfaces.pubs.informs.org.

Craig Kirkwood Selected for 2007 Ramsey Medal

June 20, 2007 - The Ramsey Medal Committee of the Decision Analysis Society of INFORMS announces that Professor Craig Kirkwood of Arizona State University has been selected to receive the Ramsey Medal for 2007. The Ramsey Medal is awarded for significant contributions to decision analysis. It is planned that Professor Kirkwood will receive the award at the National Meeting of the Decision Analysis Society and INFORMS in Seattle on November 4-7, 2007. At that time, he will also present a lecture on any decision analysis topic of his choice. Members of this year's Ramsey Medal Committee were Professors James S. Dyer, Ronald A. Howard, Gregory Parnell (Innovative Decisions, Inc.), Larry Phillips, and Ralph L. Keeney(chair).

April 24, 2007 - In a recent award ceremony at the Pentagon, Dr. Brown received a Certificate of Recognition for Excellence in Systems Engineering from Mr. James Finley, Undersecretary of Defense, Acquisition and Technology. The award was presented by Mr. Frank Anderson, President of the Defense Acquisition University (left) and Mr. Mark Schaeffer, OSD Director, Systems and Software Engineering (right). The award was given for Dr. Brown's outstanding contributions to the Department of Defense Systems Engineering revitalization initiative.

April 16, 2007 - “Artificial Intelligence for Constructing Accurate, Low-Cost Models and Simulations” a paper co-written by Dr David P. Brown and CAPT (ret) Richard A. Mohler, USN, currently employed by IDI and Northrop Grumman respectively, was published in the Proceedings of the 2005 Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference held in Orlando, FL. The paper was recognized by being selected for presentation at the conference and was one of a group of select papers for which education credits were awarded to participants at the presentation. The paper was then submitted for review within the Northrop Grumman Corporation annual paper competition, where it was recently awarded “Best Technical Paper” for 2006 in the Military Group.

February 24, 2007 - Dr. Greg Parnell, Senior Principal, was recently interviewed as part of the Oral History Project of the Military Operations Research Society (MORS). The purpose of the project is to preserve and pass on to future generations of OR analysts the experience and perspectives of the leading practitioners of the profession, in their own words. As a past president of MORS and a Fellow of the Society (FS), Greg is one of the nation's "leading lights" of decision analysis. He was interviewed by "fellow" MORS Fellow Dr. Bob Sheldon.

In the interview, Greg describes his rich career providing analysis in support of military decision makers. "As I reflect back on my career, I have been very fortunate," he says. Besides support from his family and his mentors, he had the opportunity to work on a variety of important projects "with great people." These included work on strategic nuclear missiles, military base closings, and capability based planning. Greg has also had a distinguished teaching career at the Air Force Institute of Technology, Virginia Commonwealth University, and West Point.

IDI is pleased to congratulate Greg Parnell for this special honor. A full transcript of the interview can be found in the journal Military Operations Research, Volume 11, Number 4, 2006. More information about the Military Operations Research Society can be found at www.mors.org.

January 30, 2007 - Dr. Robin Dillon-Merrill, a principal at IDI, has co-authored a research paper published in the journal Decision Analysis that suggests an approach to overcome challenges faced by decision and risk analysts when they use each others’ products. The paper points out that, “Risk analyses are often performed in the absence of a known decision maker to assess probabilities and to choose risk management options based on his or her preferences and risk attitude.” It goes on to say, “Yet, it is not unusual for decision makers to use the results of a risk analysis without explicitly revealing their preferences in the form of a utility function as required by a formal decision analysis.”

This problem can have serious consequences. As the paper describes in the case of the failure of space shuttle Columbia’s tiles, “a risk analysis separate from a decision analysis provided more independence to the analysts, but was disconnected from some decision makers who ignored the results because they did not fit their beliefs and their interests at the time.”

In addition to her IDI work, Robin is an assistant professor of Operations and Information Management at the McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University. Robin’s co-author for the paper is Dr. Elizabeth Pate-Cornell, head of the Department of Management Science & Engineering at Stanford University. The paper is entitled, “The Respective Roles of Risk and Decision Analyses in Decision Support.”

January 5, 2007 - Dr. Dan Maxwell was tapped by ORMS Today to head up its biennial industry survey of decision analysis software. The bimonthly magazine is published by INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. INFORMS is the major professional organization for decision analysts in the country. This year’s survey, the eighth over the past dozen years, elicited responses from twenty different companies and included reviews of 38 decision analysis tools. The objective of the survey is to provide decision analysts and other potential users with insight into the functionality, costs, and computing platforms required for each package.

Dan, a senior principal at IDI, has led the survey effort for the OR community several times before, and although it is time consuming, he considers it a labor of love. “Properly used, decision analysis software is a powerful tool for connecting the lore and craft that help decision analysts work effectively with people to the formal methods that ensure the results of the process are rational.” We thank him (once again!) for his hard work and his leadership in the field of decision analysis.

September 27, 2006 – The National BioShield Stakeholders Workshop was held in Crystal City, VA on September 25-26, 2006. It was attended by over 300 representatives from government, industry, and academia. Project BioShield is a national program intended to accelerate the research, development, and acquisition of medical countermeasures to protect the US population from the effects of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) terrorist threats. IDI staff members Dave Brown, Gary Smith, Dennis Buede, Freeman Marvin, and Jake Ulvila (not shown) supported planning for the event and facilitated the breakout sessions.

The BioShield program provides $5.6 billion over a ten-year period to buy drugs and other medical items for the Strategic National Stockpile. Some high priority purchases were made in the first two years of the program. The Department of Health and Human Services formed an interagency working group to create a strategic plan and an implementation roadmap that will show how to best spend the remaining funds.

IDI was asked to facilitate the working group meetings using our unique combination of decision analysis methods, group facilitation skills, and computer modeling tools. Over a five month period, IDI is helping the working group build an integrated value model to identify priorities for medical countermeasures, generate strategic options for research, development, and acquisition under conditions of uncertainty, and determine the optimal plan for providing medical countermeasures to the national stockpile.

June 30, 2006 – IDI Senior Principal Greg Parnell and two West Point colleagues have completed the first edition of a new textbook -- Parnell, G. S., Driscoll, P. J., and Henderson D. L., Editors, Systems Decision Making for Systems Engineering and Management, Fall 2006 Edition, Printed by Wiley & Sons Inc., 2006.

The purpose of the book is to provide a textbook for the first undergraduate course for systems engineers. The textbook describes the techniques the Systems Engineering Department faculty at the United States Military Academy have found the most useful for systems problem solving. The textbook has three parts: systems thinking, systems engineering, and systems decision making.

A unique feature of the text is two systems decisions examples that illustrate and integrate the material in the text. The book will be used this Fall for two introductory courses in Systems Engineering at West Point. In addition, the text will be a reference for the department's capstone research projects. The book will also be used in the Fall at the University of Arkansas.

The forward to the text was written by BG (Ret) Mike McGinnis. The book was edited by Drs. Greg Parnell and Pat Driscoll. LTC Dale Henderson was the graphics editor for the book and typeset the 400 page book. The thirteen chapters were researched and written by Dr. Roger Burk, Dr. Pat Driscoll, LTC Simon Goerger, LTC Rob Kewley, LTC Mike Kwinn, Dr, Greg Parnell, LTC (P) Bob Powell, COL Tim Trainor, and Dr. Paul West at West Point and colleagues from other universities - Dr. Ed Pohl, University of Arkansas, Dr Bob Foote, University of Oklahoma, and Dr. John Kobza, Texas Tech University.

Don Buckshaw and Greg Parnell win MORS Journal Award

June 14, 2006 – IDI Principal Don Buckshaw and Senior Principal Greg Parnell and their team were awarded the 2006 Military Operations Research Journal Award. The award was presented June 14th at the annual Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Symposium held this year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, CO. Their paper “Mission-Oriented Risk and Design Analysis for Critical Information Systems” appeared in Volume 10, No. 2 of the MORS journal.

The Journal Award recognizes members of the analytic profession who have expanded the application of military operations research techniques, deepened insight into a specific defense area, or improved the available set of analytical tools, while communicating the results of their work to the broader analytical community. Each published article was judged on the basis of its ability to clearly communicate to the military operations research community the ideas of the authors.

More information about the Military Operations Research Society can be found at www.mors.org. This and other papers written by IDI employees can be found in the Resources - Publications section.

November 1, 2005 - Greg Parnell, Robin Dillon-Merrill, and Terry Bresnick have co-authored a chapter on risk management in the recently published Homeland Security Handbook. Edited by David Kamien the handbook is "the definitive guide for Law Enforcement, EMT, and all other security professionals." To purchase a copy of the handbook, go to Amazon.com.

October 7, 2005 - Mr. Bob Kitchen, president of Catalyze, Ltd., makers of the EQUITY software package for resource allocation, recently held a special seminar for IDI staff. Innovative Decisions, Inc., is one of the most experienced consulting companies in the U.S. using EQUITY to help clients improve the way they develop budgets and allocate other types of resources.

EQUITY uses an incremental benefit to cost ratio to create an order of priority for funding. In contrast to an optimization routine, the EQUITY approach produces an efficient solution that is robust, even at increased or decreased budget levels. The seminar reviewed recent changes in the software and covered some of the advanced features. Bob Kitchen also announced the final release of EQUITY version 3.2, which has been in Beta for several months.

September 20, 2005 - IDI Senior Principal Greg Parnell and his team will be given a special award by the US Army for his leadership in the recent Pentagon BRAC efforts.

The project was called the "2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Analysis Support for The Army Basing Study." Greg's team members included MAJ Paul L. Ewing Jr., Mr. Jeffrey W. Bassichis, Mr. Richard A. Pedersen, Mr. John M. Bott, and Mr. Rob Dell.

Greg will receive the award at the 44th U.S. Army Operations Research Symposium (AORS XLIV) 11-13 October 2005 at the Army Logistics Management College, Fort Lee, Virginia.

Congratulations to Greg and his team for leading this effort and receiving this
special award for their work.

April 22, 2005 - Ward Edwards, internationally known authority on decision analysis and behavioral decision research, died February 1 at Glendale Memorial Hospital in Glendale, CA.

Dr. Edwards retired from the University of Southern California in 1995 after a career that included teaching at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Michigan. At USC, he was the director of the Social Science Research Institute from 1973 to 1995.

Ward was known professionally to many staff members at IDI and was a personal mentor to several of them. We will miss his wisdom and friendship.

April 8, 2005 - Innovative Decisions, Inc. (IDI) is one of the top consulting firms in the United States specializing in applied decision analysis. Its cadre of over 20 staff analysts and consultants are not only in high demand by senior decision makers in business and government, but also by organizations in the operations research field eager to have the leadership of IDI professionals.

Dr. Greg Parnell, Senior Principal at IDI and professor of systems engineering at West Point, is serving this year as President of the Decision Analysis Society of the Institute for Operations Research/Management Science (INFORMS). Mr. Freeman Marvin, also a Senior Principal at IDI, is serving as Chairman of the Decision Analysis Working Group of the Military Operations Research Society (MORS).

IDI decision analysts have been tapped for a variety of positions in previous years by INFORMS, MORS, and the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). IDI also has a significant elected membership in the International Decision Conferencing Forum (IDCF), a select group of decision scientists and practicing "decision facilitators" from Europe, Australia and the US.