Biography Oscar Barros
Dr. Oscar Barros (Ph.D. U. Wisconsin) specialized in Operations Research (OR) and initiated its career at the Department of Industrial Engineering (DIE) of the University of Chile. Here he created the first group of Operations Research in Chile and designed and directed the first Master in the discipline, besides writing two books on the subject. This group and Master evolved into the successful area and graduate studies, including a Ph. D., in Operations Management, which is currently a national and international referent.
He also developed the discipline of Information Systems (IS) at the DIE and formed the first group of this type at a university in Chile and designed and directed a Master on the subject. This Master trained the professionals who managed the first IS groups in several companies of the country. Additionally, he wrote three books on the subject, books that have been used in many universities of Chile and internationally; the methodologies proposed in these books have been adopted by many companies.
In the last years Dr. Barros has been dedicated to the development of an original methodology for the design of businesses and their processes, based on the idea of patterns, integrated with the design of Information Systems that support such processes, which he has communicated in three books, several international publications and through his web site www@obarros.cl and blog.obarros.cl. His last contribution is the design and creation of the novel and recognized Master in Business Engineering (MBE), which is based on innovative concepts of education and technological development and his ideas about how business should be designed. He has also directs a large scale applied research program that is applying the ideas of Business Engineering to health services, which has already produced general solutions that are implemented in several hospitals with very significant impacts on productivity and quality of service, which have been reported in the book Barros, O. (2013). Business Engineering and Service Design with Applications For Health Care Institutions. New York: Business Expert Press (Filial McGraw Hill).
He has written eleven books with more than 100,000 copies sold, on the subjects of Operations Research, Information Systems, Information Technologies, Process Reengineering and Business Engineering.
He has also published widely in international scientific and technical journals, such as Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, Information Systems, Management Datamatics, Journal of Systems and Software, Journal of Computer and Information Systems and Business Process Management Journal ; and also in proceeding of prestigious conferences, such as the International Conference on Information Systems, International Conference on CASE (IEEE), Operational Research (North Holland) and Information Processing (North Holland). These publication can be found at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Oscar_Barros/contributions
Dr. Barros has also been active in applied research and consulting, nationally and internationally, having directed many large-scale projects on Operations Research modeling, Information Systems Development and Business Process Reengineering in areas such as physical process control, distribution management, production management, private and public sector services management and bank operations. In particular, in Chile, he developed the first mathematical models of mine planning, the first simulation model of copper conversion processes and the first mathematical models of forest planning in collaboration with other academics; at the moment he is leading the use of analytical methods to optimize the operation of hospitals. He has also been a consultant to the World Bank and OEA.
In parallel to his academic work, he created the first private education and training program in Computing and Information Systems in Chile, including the first diploma in Systems Analysis, which graduated thousands of professionals who worked in the most varied national companies. He also created businesses in software distribution, being the first representative of Oracle in Chile, and publications, producing the first Chilean computing publication, Informatica, and local versions of Computer World and PC World.