Traditional First Post

Hello

Welcome to Bernoulli on Business and as blog tradition leads me "First Post"!!

I look forward to the niche market of those folks who may be interested in building skills and examining issues that apply to operations management. The list of books off to the right are books I intend to review as part of building up my skills. I plan to use GNU R, Python (with the SciPy library) and Excel. If you are an open source fan you may wonder why I am using Excel. There are three reasons I am using Excel. 1) Some of the books I will be reviewing use Excel. So some of what I will be doing is building my initial skills in Excel, then expanding them with GNU R and/or Python. 2) Despite what many open source people hope, Excel is the gold standard in business for quick analysis. 3) Excel is more mature than Calc from OpenOffice.

Now you may ask, if Excel is the business standard, why are you using the other open source programs as they are not standards for business in general? For both GNU R and Python, I am using them because I want to learn them in detail. Also due to Python's minimalistic style, it makes for a good language to write code where I can post and comment. If I used something like visual basic there would be way too many lines of code for buttons and windows that it would annoy readers. So really, I am going to apply the right tools to the job.

Since this blog covers topics related to operations management, topics will include risk, quality, project management, decision theory, optimization, simulation, and process management. At a future date I plan to apply these topics to issues with computer security. At this time I will focus on issues in their traditional scope. I look forward to your posts.