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The Long Perspective on Call Scheduling

I recently went back and read papers written during the early days of the development of CATI. I found this very interesting quote from an article by J. Merrill Shanks from 1983:

“Among the procedures that are supported by (or related to) CATI systems, none has proved more difficult to discuss than the algorithms or options available for management of interviewers’ time and the scheduling or assignment of actual calls to specific interviewers. Most observers agree that computer-assisted systems can yield improvements in the efficiency or productivity of interviewer labor by scheduling the calls required to contact respondents in a particular household across an appropriately designed search pattern, and by keeping track of the ‘match’ between staff availability and the schedule of calls to be made” (Shanks, 1983, p. 133).
It seems like today people would agree that this is a "difficult to discuss" problem. I'm not sure that there is a sense that there are large gains out there to be had.

It's not as if there is a lot of published research in this area. My fear is that most of the experience in this area is undocumented. That different organizations have had a long evolution of gradually tuning their procedures. Each step might represent a minor improvement. Over the long haul, this might lead to a significantly better system. But no one person has enough of a view of the process to really see that. Hmm.
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