Ernest Forman
Professor of Decision Sciences
Contact:
2201 G Street NW, Suite 404
Washington, DC 20052
Ernest Forman is a professor of decision sciences at the George Washington University School of Business. He has extensive experience with executive decision-making methodologies, resource allocation, project portfolio management, operations management and statistics. He received one of the first United States patents issued for computer software and designed Expert Choice, a computerized implementation of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, which is now used extensively throughout the United States as well as in Canada, South and Central America, Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East. Applications include a wide range of government and business decisions involving tradeoffs among conflicting objectives, some quantitative, some qualitative. Examples of such problems include government policy, allocation of R&D funds, cost/benefit analysis, employee evaluation, setting corporate priorities, group decision-making, conflict resolution and strategic planning. Dr. Forman’s expertise is widely recognized and he is frequently consulted by organizations such as IBM, MERCK, John Deere, Ford, AOL, NIST, Boeing, GAO, IRS, NASA, CIA, DoD, state, and local governments.
Dr. Forman holds six U.S. patents related to decision-making and is the co-founder of Expert Choice, Inc. In addition to developing Expert Choice, Dr. Forman is the creator of four other commercial software products: Team Expert Choice, The Accountant, The Business Accountant, and Stratatree. He has conducted national and international seminars on decision support, group decision-making, resource allocation, data base management, distributed processing, and forecasting.
Dr. Forman has authored Decision by Objectives, and has co-authored An Analytic Framework for Marketing Decisions, The Hierarchon – A Dictionary of Hierarchies, and Advances in Telematics. He is engaged in research, development and writing about the theory of measurement, evaluation and choice; corporate and public sector applications of decision analysis; strategic planning; resource allocation; conflict resolution and project portfolio management.
Prior to joining the faculty of George Washington University, Dr. Forman was a member of the technical staff of the MITRE Corporation, where he conducted seminal research and development of a distributed data base system and evaluated remote utilization of a variety of unique computer resources on the experimental ARPA computer network (forerunner of the INTERNET).
- Executive Decision Making
- Quality Decision Making
- Prioritization
- Resource Allocation
- Project Portfolio Management
- Data Analysis
- Quality decision making
- The Analytic Hierarchy Process
- Deriving probability distributions
- The difference between investing and gambling
- Risk measurement and mitigation
- Project portfolio management
- Capital investment portfolio optimization
- 360 degree performance evaluations
- Physician performance measurement
D.S.C., The George Washington University, 1974
M.S.O.R., Johns Hopkins University, 1968
B.S.E.E., University of Rochester, 1964
- Executive Decision Making
- Project Portfolio Management
- Risk Management
- Risk Analysis for Decision Making
- Judgment, Uncertainty and Decisions
- Data Analysis and Decisions
Articles
Forman, E., with Stovsky, MD, Bayazit, Y. et al. “A Novel Computer Based Expert Decision-Making Model for Prostate Cancer Disease Management,” Journal of Urology 2005 Dec; 174(6) 2310-2318.
Forman, Ernest H., with Gass, Saul I, “The Analytic Hierarchy Process – An Exposition,” Operations Research, Vol. 49, no. 4, July-Aug 2001, pp. 469-486.
Forman, Ernest H., with Gass, Saul I, “The Analytic Hierarchy Process – An Exposition,” Operations Research, Vol.49, no. 4, July-Aug 2001, pp. 469-486.
Forman, Ernest H., with Peniwati, Kirti, “Aggregating Individual Judgments and Priorities with the Analytic Hierarchy Process,” European Journal of Operations Research, 108 (1998), 165-169.
Forman, Ernest H. with Dyer, Robert F., “Group Decision Support with the Analytic Hierarchy Process,” Decision Support Systems, Vol. 8, pp 99-124, 1992.
Forman, Ernest H., with Dyer, Robert F., and Mustafa, Mohammad, “Decision Support for Media Selection Using The Analytic Hierarchy Process,” Journal of Advertising, Volume XXI, Number 1, March 1992 pp 59-72.
Forman, Ernest H., “An Empirical Stopping Rule for Debugging and Testing Computer Software,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 72, Number 360, December 1977.
Forman, Ernest, “Establishing a Local Guide for Network Usage,” ARPANET RFC 274 (NIC 7901), MITRE, 1 November 1971.
Books
Forman, Ernest H., with Selly, Mary Ann, Decision by Objectives – How to Convince Others that You are Right, (2001) World Scientific Press.
Forman, Ernest H., with Dyer, Robert F., An Analytic Approach to Marketing Decisions, Prentice Hall 1991, 368p.
Forman, Ernest H. with Saaty, Thomas L., The Hierarchon – A Dictionary of Hierarchies, The Analytic Hierarchy Process Series – Volume V, RWS Publications, Pittsburgh Pa., 1993, 495 pp.