Management Science can, in many respects, be regarded as a sub-discipline of engineering and may even be called managerial engineering  - as opposed to electrical, mechanical or chemical engineering  - subsuming the growing field of financial engineering. We aim to understand management problems and management systems in the same way as engineers understand their systems: by decomposing them into suitable parts, studying the parts, possibly sub-dividing again, and then studying how these parts are combined and integrated to produce the function of the overall system. Modelling is our core methodology. Our credo is "we do not understand what we cannot model." Not all management problems are amenable to a "Management Science Treatment" - but many are. The decomposition approach of engineering offers a general roadmap to understanding a management problem or system and improving it.

A key difference between "real" science and Management Science is that management problems don’t have a “right answer”. Most management problems are significantly more complex and messy than traditional scientific problems. They include human interactions and take place in political environments, which are not governed by simple rules that can be formulated in a tractable mathematical or computational model. Even if we can devise a model that we believe reflects a real-life management situation quite well, there is often a lack of reliable data to feed into the model and calibrate it to the practical situation. We must always be aware of these inherent limitations of our discipline. In that regard, the term Management Science is a misnomer. In fact, the discipline is much less ambitious and much more pragmatic: There may not be a right answer but there are more sensible and less sensible answers, there are answers that work better than others. And data and models can help us distinguish the good from the bad. This is the playground of Management Science and it is this pragmatic “what counts is what works” attitude that the discipline shares with the engineering field.

You want some evidence of the excitement of Management Science? Read the cover story of a recent issue of Business Week to get an idea of the power of mathematics in today's business world. The webpages of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), the INFORMS careers pages, and the “ Science-of-Better ” website contain further material on the impact of our discipline on business and society.