While their husbands progressed through their own formation program, these women helped one another accept and live their newly acquired role in the Church as deacons' wives.

This book is an engaging and accessible collection that celebrates the nuance and depth of student-faculty partnerships in higher education. It aims to break the mold of traditional and power-laden academic writing by showcasing creative genres such as reflection, poetry, dialogue, interview, vignette, and essay. The collection has invited chapters from renowned scholars in the field alongside new student and staff voices, and it reflects and embodies a wide range of student-staff partnership perspectives from different roles, identities, cultures, countries, and institutions.

"In this book, I have found answers to key questions and misconceptions about the relationship between Six Sigma and the Capability Maturity Model Integration [CMMI]....Among my key takeaways is that the relationship between Six Sigma and CMMI exemplifies one of the principles of S4/IEE: CMMI provides process infrastructure that is needed to support a successful Six Sigma strategy." —Forrest W. Breyfogle III, CEO, Smarter Solutions, Inc. "Finally, a book that bridges the software and hardware process tool set. To date, there have been hardware and software engineers who for one reason or another have not communicated their process methods. And so, myths formed that convinced the hardware community that CMMI was only for software and likewise convinced the software community that Six Sigma was only for hardware. It is both refreshing and thought provoking to dispel these myths." —Jack Ferguson, Manager, SEI Appraisal Program, Software Engineering Institute CMMI and Six Sigma represent two of the best-known process improvement initiatives. Both are designed to enhance work quality and thereby produce business advantages for an organization. It's a misconception that the two are in competition and cannot be implemented simultaneously. Practitioners originally trained in either CMMI or Six Sigma are now finding that the two initiatives work remarkably well together in the pursuit of their common goal. CMMI® and Six Sigma: Partners in Process Improvement focuses on the synergistic, rather than competitive, implementation of CMMI and Six Sigma—with synergy translating to "faster, better, cheaper" achievement of mission success. Topics range from formation of the value proposition to specific implementation tactics. The authors illustrate how not taking advantage of what both initiatives have to offer puts an organization at risk of sinking time, energy, and money into "inventing" a solution that already exists. Along the way they debunk a few myths about Six Sigma applications in software. While the authors concentrate on the interoperability of Six Sigma and CMMI, they also recognize that organizations rarely implement only these two initiatives. Accordingly, the discussion turns to the emerging realm of "multimodel" process improvement and strategies and tactics that transcend models to help organizations effectively knit together a single unified internal process standard. Whether you work in the defense industry, for a commercial organization, or for a government agency—wherever quality and efficiency matter—you'll find this book to be a valuable resource for bridging process issues across domains and building an improvement strategy that succeeds.

This book presents fundamental concepts and technologies to tackle interoperability between information systems. It details interoperability at the data, service, and process level, and combines theoretical foundations with hands-on presentation of technologies to enable the development of sound and practical integration. Chapter 1 details general interoperability challenges and describes the structure of the book. To start with, Chapter 2 presents technologies for the exchange of data between two selected and highly relevant data formats, i.e., relational databases and XML. Next, Chapter 3 explains concepts for schema matching and mapping and data integration as well as the technological basis for implementing them based on query and transformation languages like XPath and XSLT. Chapter 4 then turns to service interoperability and explains two related technologies -- REST and GraphQL -- in detail. In Chapter 5, fundamentals for designing process orchestrations at the conceptual level are presented, focusing on how to model process orchestrations and how to verify their correctness and soundness, and showing BPMN as the de facto modeling standard. Chapter 6 then details the concepts and languages for the implementation of process orchestrations, including the presentation of execution languages for process orchestrations that are equipped with a formal semantics, e.g., Workflow Nets, the Refined Process Structure Tree, and CPEE Trees. Subsequently, Chapter 7 focuses on the growing number of distributed, loosely coupled, and often non-interoperable applications through the concepts of enterprise application integration and explains these by an implementation in CPN Tools and by two case studies. Eventually, Chapter 8 is lifting the orchestration and integration concepts and technologies to the choreography level by dealing with the interoperability between different process orchestrations. Chapter 9 concludes the book by featuring success factors for interoperability projects. It also provides a range of open research directions for interoperability such as compliance, sensor fusion, and blockchain technologies. The book is mainly intended as a textbook to be used for developing and teaching courses on interoperability and integration. To this end, it is accompanied by a Web site with additional teaching materials. It also spans a bridge from researchers to graduate students and practitioners by providing a deep understanding on practical interoperability challenges and solutions. The focus here is put on de facto standards and open-source systems and tools to enable interoperability solutions at low cost.

This book examines the processes and relationships that underpin the delivery of new homes across the United Kingdom, focussing primarily on the land use planning system in England, the way that housing providers engage with that system, and how the processes of engagement are changing or might change in the future. Planning, market and social house building - the three key processes - are first dissected and explored individually, then brought together to study the key areas of interaction between planning and the providers of social and market housing by way of the range of tensions that have consistently dogged those interactions. Extensive illustrative case study material provides a platform to the consideration of developing more integrated, realistic and proactive approaches to planning. Proposing evolutionary, and sometimes radical proposals for change, Delivering New Homes makes a bold contribution to finding a better way of delivering the new homes that the nation increasingly needs.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg clearly identified the corporate sector as one of the key actors in the delivery of national and international poverty reduction targets in developing countries. "Partnerships" between government, civil society and business were proposed as one means whereby these poverty reduction targets were to be achieved. Despite the rhetoric, there was less consideration of how such partnerships could work in practice, the outcomes that could be achieved, or the relative merits of partnerships over other, more traditional approaches to development. This book is about partnerships between the private sector, government and civil society. Its objective is to share practical experiences in establishing and implementing such partnerships and to show how partnerships work. The focus is on the oil, gas and mining industries, as these sectors have tended to be the primary drivers of foreign investment in developing countries. These corporations increasingly operate in regions characterised by poor communities and fragile environments. The more effective use of external relationships to ensure the effective contribution of these investments to poverty reduction and local environmental management is critical, for the companies, for government, and for the poor. Putting Partnerships to Work is based on the work of the Secretariat of the Natural Resources Cluster (NRC) of Business Partners for Development (BPD). This major research programme, which ran from 1998 to 2002, aimed to enhance the role of oil, gas and mining corporations in international development. The programme objective was to produce practical guidance, based on the experience of specific natural resource operations around the world, on how partnerships involving companies, government authorities and civil-society organisations can be an effective means of reducing investment risks and of promoting community and regional development. The programme encompassed partnerships in Colombia, Nigeria, India, Venezuela, Bolivia, Zambia, Azerbaijan, Indonesia and Tanzania. The specific projects that were implemented included not only "traditional" development projects such as the provision of water, healthcare or infrastructure but also themes as diverse as conflict prevention, regional development, micro-enterprise development and managing oil spill compensation. Based on the experience of establishing and implementing effective partnerships, the NRC identified good practice, and developed replicable guidelines, tools and training materials. This book is not only about good practice; it presents both the positive outcomes and lessons from the programme, as well as the risks and costs, and where things went wrong. It also provides evidence not only of the viability of partnerships (i.e. that partnerships "can work") but also evidence that partnership approaches can provide substantially better outcomes for all parties than can more traditional approaches to development or corporate social responsibility. For example, a road in India was constructed at 25% of the cost to government; it took just 11 months for a community health centre in Venezuela to become operational and with its long-term financial future assured; and primary education enrolment rates in the vicinity of a gold mine in Tanzania have jumped from a historic level of 60–80% to almost 100% (as a consequence of improved infrastructure and community awareness of the importance of education). These development and public-sector benefits have been accompanied by substantial business benefits, including significant reductions in the cost of community development initiatives and/or the leverage of additional resources, greater sustainability and viability of development projects and significant improvements to corporate reputation and their local "social licence to operate" with communities. The book argues that to achieve these benefits requires all parties to invest time and effort in first exploring the best design for the partnership, understanding the motivations of their potential partners and, once the partnership has been established, continuing to actively support the partnership and ensure its ongoing viability. Partnerships that engage the strengths of companies, government and civil society can, under the right conditions, yield better (and more sustainable) results for communities and for business than traditional approaches to development. The authors argue that, because it is built on the central idea of each partner "doing what they do best", the partnership approach offers an opportunity to rethink the way in which companies view they contributions to the livelihoods of local communities. Through partnerships it is possible that community development will be seen less as an "add-on" or "cost" to the company but more an integral part of business strategy providing significant commercial and other benefits. Perhaps most importantly, partnerships offer the potential for regional operating companies to change the perceptions of government and of civil society that the company will take the primary responsibility for local development. Rather, partnerships enable companies to locate themselves as one of (but not the only) agent of development in the local region. Partnerships enable communities to take charge of their own development needs, interacting with government to jointly design and maintain public services. They also allow government to play its proper role of fulfilling its public mandate, delivering necessary services and ensuring the quality and sustainability of development impacts. The challenges of poverty reduction in the developing world are so great that no one sector can address them on its own. Partnerships between business, government and civil society are a means of addressing this most fundamental of truths. It is hoped that this book will provide a road map for all those working towards making the elimination of poverty a reality.

Originally published in 2001. Drawing together a broad range of material on Partnership Governance, this volume provides an invaluable contribution to a fast-growing area of political science. Powerful syntheses and a robust analytical framework accompany three empirical case studies focusing on how the transition from government to governance in Northern Ireland is being superimposed on the deep historical divisions that still exist. Political scientists, geographers, government and society and local development specialists will find this text striking in both its substance and lucid style. The text will also be of interest to public policy officials relying on public partnerships as a means of tackling social, economic and political problems.