Valuing versatility
It’s often said that we live in an age of increased specialization: physicians who treat just one ailment, scholars who study just one period, network administrators who know just one operating system.But in a series of recent papers, researchers at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) have shown that, in a number of different contexts, a little versatility can go a long way. Their theoretical analyses could have implications for operations management, cloud computing — and possibly even health-care delivery and manufacturing. Take, for instance, a product-support call center for a company with a wide range of products. It’s far more cost-effective to train each customer service representative on the technical specifications of a single product than on all the products. But what if a bunch of calls about a product come in, and the center doesn’t have enough specialists to field them?Kuang Xu, a graduate student in...