Suchergebnisse

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 verdict in the case of Milliken v. Bradley, thereby blocking the state of Michigan from merging the Detroit public school system with those of the surrounding suburbs. This decision effectively walled off underprivileged students in many American cities, condemning them to a system of racial and class segregation and destroying their chances of obtaining a decent education. In this work, the author compares two cities, his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina, in order to examine the consequences of the nation's ongoing educational inequities. The school system in Syracuse is a slough of despair, the one in Raleigh a beacon of hope. Grant argues that the chief reason for Raleigh's educational success is the integration by social class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System. By contrast, the primary cause of Syracuse's decline has been the growing class and racial segregation of its metropolitan schools, which has left the city mired in poverty. This book is a study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative. The result is an ambitious portrait, sometimes disturbing, often inspiring, of two cities that exemplify our nation's greatest educational challenges, as well as an exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.

Argues that Spanish claims on the British overseas territory of Gibraltar should command the attention of the US foreign & security policy community, offering a critical examination of those claims as counter to Gibraltarian & US interests. The Gibraltar problem is detailed along with its strategic significance to the US. The implications of the Gibraltar problem for Taiwan, the legal-diplomatic logic of missile defense, & the US issue of slavery reparations are then outlined. Problems with Spain's uncompromising view on Gibraltar are considered. The centrality of Gibraltar's tax & regulatory system to maintaining regulatory competition, which the US favors, is also noted. Adapted from the source document.

The advances of modern computer-based innovation have been mind-bogglingly fast and have changed both business and everyday life around the world. But change has not come evenly. The very pace of technological advancement has tended to hide some fundamental problems that have existed from the start. These involve, not the technology only, but the management and application of that technology. The human and organizational factors have not kept pace. They have remained relatively static and, to a shocking degree, ineffective. As a result, the IT department in any organization has somehow remained a breed apart. Communication between IT and the rest of the organization is fraught with misunderstanding. This leads to failures, recrimination, and, sometimes, wholesale changes which fall well wide of their goals. The authors wrote this book because they wanted both business and IT to change the way they think and talk about how IT is invested in and managed in organizations. In The Value Imperative readers will be introduced to a new business model called The Agricultural Model created by the authors for managing IT in organizations. This innovative model will help you learn how to change the mindset of people in your organization about how IT should be invested in and managed; key considerations for ensuring that business value is delivered from IT investments; how to measure that value that has been delivered and whether there has been effective return on the investments made; and finally the authors challenge business and IT managers to focus on the business value that customers seek which will help companies.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to analyze some Brazilian companies' use of the information technology portfolio management (ITPM) technique as an aid to their information technology (IT) investments management.


Design/methodology/approach
– It was carried out in five case studies in different Brazilian companies from several economic sectors which were using ITPM or were in the initial implementation phase. Eight interviews were conducted. The persons interviewed were high-level executives working in the IT department in the studied companies.


Findings
– Different levels of ITPM use was found with respect to IT investment management (planning, control and evaluation). It was observed, in the analyzed cases, that ITPM is used most frequently in IT investment planning, which is the process most discussed and used in analyzed companies. The ITPM technique is used more frequently in Company 2 than in the other cases because the organization of the IT area in the company is structured according to ITPM dimensions.


Research limitations/implications
– The ITPM technique has received little attention in IT research and research in this area identifying the use and applicability of ITPM in companies is still very limited in the information systems literature.


Originality/value
– The paper presents IT investment management in different Brazilian companies and how ITPM was used to help companies in this process compose by planning, control and evaluation.