Ernest Forman | |
---|---|
Born | New York City, USA |
Nationality | American |
Occupation(s) | Scholar and academic |
Academic background | |
Education | Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering Master of Science, Management Science Doctor of Science, Operations Research |
Alma mater | University of Rochester Johns Hopkins University George Washington University |
Academic work | |
Institutions | George Washington University |
Website | https://professorforman.com/ |
Ernest Forman is an American scholar and academic. He is a Professor of Decision Sciences at the George Washington University's School of Business. [1] He is a co-founder,along with Thomas Saaty,of Expert Choice and developed the first commercial implementation of the Analytic Hierarchy Process. [2]
Forman's work has been focused on executive decision-making,resource allocation,project portfolio management,risk analysis and risk management,operations management and statistics. He is the author of An Analytic Approach to Marketing Decisions,The Hierarchon:A Dictionary of Hierarchies,and Decision By Objectives:How To Convince Others That You Are Right. [3]
Forman has seven patents related to decision-making and risk analysis to his name. [4]
Forman received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester in 1964. He then studied Management Science and received his M.S. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1968 before earning his D.Sc. degree in Operations Research from the George Washington University in 1974. [1]
Forman served as a Lieutenant in the United States Navy and taught mathematics and electrical engineering at the U.S. Naval Nuclear Power School. Later,he worked at the MITRE Corporation,a think tank,where he conducted seminal research for the development of the ARPA computer network,which later evolved into the Internet. [5] Forman then joined the faculty of The George Washington University where he is a Professor of Decision Sciences. [1]
Forman has worked on executive decision-making methodologies,resource allocation,project portfolio management,risk analysis and risk management,forecasting,operations management and statistics. He has also engaged in research,development and writing about the theory of measurement,corporate and public sector applications of decision analysis,strategic planning,and conflict resolution. Forman's later work involves R&D for improving risk assessment and risk management. He designed Riskion,a tool for risk assessment. [3]
Forman has conducted major research in the area of decision making,focusing especially on a process called the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). [6] His often cited article in Operations Research,"The Analytic Hierarchy Process -- An Exposition",explained important aspects of the practical applications of AHP such as when rank reversal is desirable and when it is not and how AHP has been used in a wide variety of important,complex decisions. [7] Another often cited article "An Empirical Stopping Rule for debugging and testing computer software" was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. [8]
Most recently,Forman has addressed many of the shortcomings in today's practice of risk analysis and management. The result of his work is encapsulated in the Riskion tool for risk analysis and management which enables measurement of subjective objectives as well as the relative importance of the objectives in a way that make possible scientifically valid conclusions as to how to optimally allocate an organization's resources to manage risk. [9]
Operations research, often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve decision-making. It is considered to be a subfield of mathematical sciences. The term management science is occasionally used as a synonym.
Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It can be valuable in areas rich with recorded information; analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming, and operations research to quantify performance.
Thomas L. Saaty was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he taught in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. He is the inventor, architect, and primary theoretician of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a decision-making framework used for large-scale, multiparty, multi-criteria decision analysis, and of the Analytic Network Process (ANP), its generalization to decisions with dependence and feedback. Later on, he generalized the mathematics of the ANP to the Neural Network Process (NNP) with application to neural firing and synthesis but none of them gain such popularity as AHP.
An executive information system (EIS), also known as an executive support system (ESS), is a type of management support system that facilitates and supports senior executive information and decision-making needs. It provides easy access to internal and external information relevant to organizational goals. It is commonly considered a specialized form of decision support system (DSS).
Multiple-criteria decision-making (MCDM) or multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a sub-discipline of operations research that explicitly evaluates multiple conflicting criteria in decision making. Conflicting criteria are typical in evaluating options: cost or price is usually one of the main criteria, and some measure of quality is typically another criterion, easily in conflict with the cost. In purchasing a car, cost, comfort, safety, and fuel economy may be some of the main criteria we consider – it is unusual that the cheapest car is the most comfortable and the safest one. In portfolio management, managers are interested in getting high returns while simultaneously reducing risks; however, the stocks that have the potential of bringing high returns typically carry high risk of losing money. In a service industry, customer satisfaction and the cost of providing service are fundamental conflicting criteria.
Decision analysis (DA) is the discipline comprising the philosophy, methodology, and professional practice necessary to address important decisions in a formal manner. Decision analysis includes many procedures, methods, and tools for identifying, clearly representing, and formally assessing important aspects of a decision; for prescribing a recommended course of action by applying the maximum expected-utility axiom to a well-formed representation of the decision; and for translating the formal representation of a decision and its corresponding recommendation into insight for the decision maker, and other corporate and non-corporate stakeholders.
In the theory of decision making, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), also analytical hierarchy process, is a structured technique for organizing and analyzing complex decisions, based on mathematics and psychology. It was developed by Thomas L. Saaty in the 1970s; Saaty partnered with Ernest Forman to develop Expert Choice software in 1983, and AHP has been extensively studied and refined since then. It represents an accurate approach to quantifying the weights of decision criteria. Individual experts’ experiences are utilized to estimate the relative magnitudes of factors through pair-wise comparisons. Each of the respondents compares the relative importance of each pair of items using a specially designed questionnaire.
The analytic network process (ANP) is a more general form of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) used in multi-criteria decision analysis.
Decision-making software is software for computer applications that help individuals and organisations make choices and take decisions, typically by ranking, prioritizing or choosing from a number of options.
This is a worked-through example showing the use of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in a practical decision situation.
The decision-making paradox is a phenomenon related to decision-making and the quest for determining reliable decision-making methods. It was first described by Triantaphyllou, and has been recognized in the related literature as a fundamental paradox in multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) and decision analysis since then.
In decision-making, a rank reversal is a change in the rank ordering of the preferability of alternative possible decisions when, for example, the method of choosing changes or the set of other available alternatives changes. The issue of rank reversals lies at the heart of many debates in decision-making and multi-criteria decision-making, in particular.
SDI Tools is a set of commercial software add-in tools for Microsoft Excel developed and distributed by Statistical Design Institute, LLC., a privately owned company located in Texas, United States.
Logical Decisions is decision-making software that is based on multi-criteria decision making.
Expert Choice is decision-making software that is based on multi-criteria decision making.
Decision Lens is online decision-making software that is based on multi-criteria decision making.
Criterium DecisionPlus is decision-making software that is based on multi-criteria decision making.
D-Sight is a company that specializes in decision support software and associated services in the domains of project prioritization, supplier selection and collaborative decision-making. It was founded in 2010 as a spin-off from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Their headquarters are located in Brussels, Belgium.
PriEsT is an acronym for 'Priority Estimation Tool' which is an open-source decision-making software that implements the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method - a comprehensive framework for decision problems. PriEsT can assist decision makers in prioritizing the options available in a given scenario.
Super Decisions is decision-making software which works based on two multi-criteria decision making methods.