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Moving out of the backroom

Tracing the changing fortunes of OR in Cheshire County Council

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OR Insight

Abstract

Efforts to build an OR presence in an organization can sometimes result in a strong demand for the specialist skills that OR analysts are seen to possess. Thus, analysts may be recognized more for their “backroom” technical skills in computing and statistics than for their modelling and problem-solving abilities. This was the problem facing OR in Cheshire County Council three years ago. However, an appraisal of the direction of OR and the dissolution of functional groupings with the Council's management consultancy led to an increasingly important role for OR.

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Authors
  1. William Keddie
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  2. Stephen Buttrick
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Additional information

*William Keddie is Senior Consultant in the Audit and Consultancy Group of Cheshire County Council, providing a decision support service to all aspects of the County's business. He joined the County Council in 1984 as the OR Officer of the (then) newly-formed Consultancy Section, having previously spent five years with the Health Services OR Unit (HSORU) at the University of Strathclyde. He has been a member of the OR Society since 1978, and takes a special interest in decision-support and knowledge-based systems to aid business problems.

**Steve Buttrick is the Consultancy Manager within Cheshire County Council responsible for 30 staff providing operational research, organization and methods study, work study and general consultancy skills to the Authority. Steve obtained a BA in Business Studies from Trent Polytechnic in 1976, and spent the following 10 years at THORN EMI in a number of roles, including those of OR Analyst, Marketing Excecutive, Administration Manager, and one of four Executive Support Managers within Datasolve Ltd, a subsidiary of THORN EMI. In this latter role, Steve's Business Unit was responsible for providing micro/mainframe decision support solutions and general consultancy from Datasolve's Manchester office.

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Keddie, W., Buttrick, S. Moving out of the backroom. OR Insight 3, 3–6 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1057/ori.1990.2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ori.1990.2

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