Deciding on a Career Path? How about Decision Analysis?
That is one of his goals as a charter fellow in the Society of Decision Professionals (SDP), which was formed in mid-2010. Stonebraker also serves on SDP’s Educator Forum Council.
“My goals (as an SDP fellow) are to help students improve their decision-making skills and become aware of the decision analysis field as a potential career path,” Stonebraker said. Students may be drawn to decision analysis, “because it is something that you can use, to help you with your own decisions – in business and life in general,” he said.
“Decision analysts respond to multi-objective problems, and, in fact, most of our personal decisions are multi-objective problems – those that require answering questions like ‘How do I trade off objectives?’ or, ‘What is the value proposition of making this decision?’”
Business applications of decision analysis include the uncertainty of decisions being made for the future, such as whether to introduce a new product, when to schedule outages to accommodate a facility upgrade, bidding strategies, and corporate strategies and business portfolios. Decision analysis provides a structured framework for modeling these types of business situations.
Stonebraker teaches in the Jenkins MBA program’s supply chain management concentration, including a new decision modeling & analysis class. In the course, students will be gaining an understanding of what it means to be a consultant. They also will be covering the basic principles of decision analysis, including decision making with uncertainty and multiple objectives.
One of the early pioneers of decision analysis was Ben Franklin, who wrote letter written in 1772 to Joseph Priestly. Following is an excerpt [original formatting retained] from that letter:
“When these difficult Cases occur, they are difficult chiefly because while we have them under Consideration all the Reasons pro and con are not present to the Mind at the same time; but sometimes one Set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of Sight. Hence the various Purposes or Inclinations that alternately prevail, and the Uncertainty that perplexes us.” [See the full letter at ProCon.org
Stonebraker also is a member of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and its Decision Analysis Society.
He joined the NC State College of Management faculty in 2009. Stonebraker received his Ph.D. in management science in 1993 from the Arizona State University, and previously was on the faculty at the University of Denver. Before that, he was manager of decision analysis at GlaxoSmithKline and held related positions at Bayer Biological Products and Applied Decision Analysis, Inc. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1982-1997, retiring at the rank of major.
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Left to right: MBA students Josh Fox and Himanshu Jain, discussing a classroom assignment with Dr. Jeffrey Stonebraker.
