Over a long period of time we were receiving demand from different customers and stakeholders requesting our help with analyzing actual levels of IT management practices in their companies and to provide an external, objective look at IT, compare it with other organizations and develop a management summary of our overall findings. While this seems like a straight forward request and is covered by many consulting service providers, we struggled to develop answers to some very simple questions which are crucial to the different management levels from CEO level to IT professionals delivering operational support to the end user. Key questions we were requested to answer: _ How good is our IT? _ How is the quality of our IT evolving? _ How do we compare with other IT departments in similar organizations? _ How do we align the perception of quality between the business and IT? _ Can you compare the quality and costs of our IT? There are many existing assessment approaches based on ISO/IEC, capability models, maturity models, structured surveys as well as there being many different benchmarking approaches that provide detailed analytical outputs. These are typically focused and targeted internally, providing largely internal benefits to a company’s IT organization, looking mostly at the presence of documentation and processes, but none of them providing a comprehensive and straight forward answer to address the simple yet fundamental question asked by management – HOW GOOD IS OUR IT? We believe that a simple question should have a simple answer.

This book covers water quality indices (WQI) in depth – it describes what purpose they serve, how they are generated, what are their strengths and weaknesses, and how to make the best use of them. It is a concise and unique guide to WQIs for chemists, chemical/environmental engineers and government officials. Whereas it is easy to express the quantity of water, it is very difficult to express its quality because a large number of variables determine the water quality. WQIs seek to resolve the difficulty by translating a set of a large number of variables to a one-digit or a two-digit numeral. They are essential in communicating the status of different water resources in terms of water quality and the impact of various factors on it to policy makers, service personnel, and the lay public. Further they are exceedingly useful in the monitoring and management of water quality. With the importance of water and water quality increasing exponentially, the importance of this topic is also set to increase enormously because only with the use of indices is it possible to assess, express, communicate, and monitor the overall quality of any water source. - Provides a concise guide to WQIs: their purpose and generation - Compares existing methods and WQIs and outlines strengths and weaknesses - Makes recommendations on how the indices should be used and under what circumstances they apply

Examines the interplay between the normative and empirical aspects of the deliberative model of democracy.

We know that teachers make a profound difference in the lives of students and are the single most important school-related influence on student achievement. When it comes to teacher selection, district and building-level administrators are challenged to predict what kind of teacher a candidate will be, based on information collected through an application and one or two interviews. In this book, James H. Stronge and Jennifer L. Hindman explain how to take the guesswork out of hiring decisions. Their Teacher Quality Index (TQI) is a structured, research-based interview protocol built on the quality indicators explored in Stronge's best-selling Qualities of Effective Teachers. Here, educators with hiring responsibilities will find interview questions that reveal what they most need to know about teacher candidates and question-specific, descriptive rubrics that support consistent evaluation of candidates' responses. The Teacher Quality Index is the easiest, most reliable way to see that new hires possess both the personal qualities essential to effective teachers and the requisite proficiencies in classroom management, instructional planning and delivery, and the monitoring of student progress and potential. An accompanying CD-ROM provides forms and scoring rubrics for both screening interviews and building-based interviews. The question sets are presented in multiple configurations: variations for experienced and novice teachers as well as "interviewer's choice" formats, which allow for additional customization. Protocol guidelines, succinct discussions of underlying research, and response-rating exercises ensure readers will come away with the rationale, know-how, and tools to implement this teacher-selection process and, ultimately, increase the overall effectiveness of their teaching staff.

This book tackles the perplexing problem of how to capture the qualitative differences that exist in entrepreneurship at any given point in time or across time, by presenting a novel qualitative index: Entrepreneurship Quality Index (EQI). This comprehensive composite index is based on recognized interactions among different factors affecting intensity and types of entrepreneurial activity, which in turn is impacting the well-being. It brings qualitative differences in entrepreneurship depending on time and space into calculation of the composite index. Besides, EQI is the missing piece of the entrepreneurship puzzle, and the quality of entrepreneurship is a significant factor that shows why less developed countries do not achieve higher levels of economic growth, despite their high rate of entrepreneurial activities. This book does a masterful job in explaining the diversity of existing perspectives, their contributions, and their shortfalls. It applies rigorous tools of mathematical statistics and quality engineering, such as Bayes’ rule, maximum likelihood estimation, six sigma algorithm, and standardization equation, to derive and introduce EQI, as a novel operations research model. It offers a number of important ideas and insights as to how the quality of entrepreneurship can be measured more accurately. It also illustrates the proposed approaches showing their efficacy across time. The proposed solutions are logical and empirically sound; they represent an important leap in thinking about the quality of entrepreneurship. Its contribution is crucial and timely — one that will be well recognized by researchers worldwide. They give a much-needed framework along with the necessary tools to evaluate and measure entrepreneurial activities.

Researchers and agencies collect reams of objective data and authors publish volumes of subjective prose in attempts to explain what is meant by environmental quality. Still, we have no universally recognized methods for combining our quantitative measures with our qualitative concepts of environ ment. Not all of our environmental goals should be reduced to mere numbers, but many of them can be; and without these quantitative terms, we have no way of defining our present position nor of selecting positions we wish to attain on any logically established scale of environmen tal values. Stated simply, in our zeal to measure our environment we often forget that masses of numbers describing a system are insufficient to understand it or to be used in selecting goals and priorities for expending our economic and human resources. Attempts at quantitatively describing environmental quality, rather than merely measuring different environmental variables, are relatively recent. This condensing of data into the optimum number of terms with maximum information content is a truly interdisciplinary challenge. When Oak Ridge National Laboratory initiated its Environmental Program in early 1970 under a grant from the National Science Foundation, the usefulness of environmental indicators in assessing the effects of technology was included as one of the initial areas for investigation. James L. Liverman, through his encouragement and firm belief that these indicators are indispensable if we are to resolve our complex environmental problems, deserves much of the credit for the publication of this book.

Over a long period of time we were receiving demand from different customers and stakeholders requesting our help with analyzing actual levels of IT management practices in their companies and to provide an external, objective look at IT, compare it with other organizations and develop a management summary of our overall findings. While this seems like a straight forward request and is covered by many consulting service providers, we struggled to develop answers to some very simple questions which are crucial to the different management levels from CEO level to IT professionals delivering operational support to the end user. Key questions we were requested to answer: _ How good is our IT? _ How is the quality of our IT evolving? _ How do we compare with other IT departments in similar organizations? _ How do we align the perception of quality between the business and IT? _ Can you compare the quality and costs of our IT? There are many existing assessment approaches based on ISO/IEC, capability models, maturity models, structured surveys as well as there being many different benchmarking approaches that provide detailed analytical outputs. These are typically focused and targeted internally, providing largely internal benefits to a company's IT organization, looking mostly at the presence of documentation and processes, but none of them providing a comprehensive and straight forward answer to address the simple yet fundamental question asked by management - HOW GOOD IS OUR IT? We believe that a simple question should have a simple answer.2019 Edition is now covering also IT Quality Management System, reflects recent changes in ITIL4 and COBIT 2019. Completely new Visual Proportional Board offers straight forward implementation of visualising improvements and transforms IT into self-improving organization, where improvements are visible across the entire organization.

This book addresses the prediction of the Water Quality Index (WQI) at Perak River, State of Perak, Malaysia, using a fuzzy multiple linear regression model to tackle the uncertainty in the measurements of six key parameters – dissolved oxygen (DO), biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), suspended solids (SS), pH value (pH) and ammoniacal nitrogen (NH3-NL). Given its scope, the book is suitable for graduate students, researchers and water quality scientists.