Alternative Service Delivery: Readiness Check synthesizes academic and practitioner knowledge about alternative service delivery (ASD) systems. This handbook offers information and insights that local governments can use to provide public services more effectively and efficiently. It serves as a primer about alternative service delivery, intended to guide investigation of new approaches to service delivery. It derives from multiple conversations with local government practitioners in Illinois who were frustrated by a lack of guidance on how to think about alternative service delivery methods for public services, and in what circumstances different alternatives were more or less successful. This handbook is written for both appointed managers and elected officials who are looking for innovative ways to consider service delivery and want to answer the basic question, “Can we be doing this better?” Why does your local government want to consider providing public services in new, alternative ways? As the cases in this handbook demonstrate, jurisdictions that successfully develop and implement an alternative service delivery method are driven by a desire to improve service effectiveness. Local governments that move from tactical to strategic thinking about service delivery are the ones more likely to improve services using different forms of alternative service delivery. The kinds of issues and types of questions examined in this handbook range from how to best handle such demand-driven services as allocation of police and fire resources to how to share expensive equipment that your jurisdiction needs only some of the time. The stories, solutions, and evidence are intended to help local government officials understand the differences between delivery alternatives and the prerequisites for developing and implementing each option.

Managing Local Government: An Essential Guide for Municipal and County Managers offers a practical introduction to the changing structure, forms, and functions of local governments. Taking a metropolitan management perspective, authors Kimberly Nelson and Carl W. Stenberg explain U.S. local government within historical context and provide strategies for effective local government management and problem solving. Real-life scenarios and contemporary issues illustrate the organization and networks of local governments; the roles, responsibilities, and relationships of city and county managers; and the dynamics of the intergovernmental system. Case studies and discussion questions in each chapter encourage critical analysis of the challenges of collaborative governance. Unlike other books on the market, this text’s combined approach of theory and practice encourages students to enter municipal and county management careers and equips them with tools to be successful from day one.

La Banque mondiale a rédigé ce guide du développement de la petite enfance (DPE) pour répondre à la demande croissante de conseil et d’appui des responsables de programmes en matière de dialogue politique sur le thème du DPE, et pour aider les clients à prendre et à mettre en oeuvre des décisions pertinentes sur la meilleure manière d’investir dans le DPE dans le cadre de leur économie et de leurs priorités nationales. Ce guide comble un manque dans la littérature actuelle sur le sujet (1) en distillant l’information existante sous la forme de notes concises et faciles à utiliser ;(2) en fournissant une information pratique sur les dernières questions pertinentes relatives au DPE, telles que la mesure des résultats du développement des enfants grâce à l’identification et l’adaptation d’instruments efficaces, aux transferts monétaires conditionnels destinés aux familles de jeunes enfants, et autres ; et (3) en évaluant la qualité des derniers faits rapportés pour chaque sujet et en identifiant les lacunes en matière de connaissances pour lesquelles des expérimentations et évaluations complémentaires sont nécessaires.

This book's aim is to improve the integration of Cognitive Information Processing (CIP) theory, research, and practice, leading to more cost-effective career interventions that help persons to make informed and careful career decisions over a lifetime. The starting point for the book's content was the 2004 Sampson, Reardon, Peterson, and Lenz book, Career Counseling and Services: A Cognitive Information Processing Approach, which itself was a revision of the 1991 Peterson, Sampson, & Reardon book, Career Development and Services: A Cognitive Approach. We had four goals for this edition of our book. Our first goal was to update the theory, research, and practice of CIP theory from 2004 through the end of 2022. Our second goal was to expand the authors to better reflect the diverse community of practice that has emerged for CIP theory over the past eighteen years. Our third goal was to remove cost as a potential barrier to disseminating knowledge about CIP theory by making the book accessible as an open-access publication through the Florida State Open Publishing. Finally, our fourth goal was to disseminate the book via open-source software available in libraries which can be used to make periodic book content updates more feasible.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Soft Computing, Intelligent Systems, and Information Technology, ICSIIT 2015, held in Bali, Indonesia, in March 2015. The 34 revised full papers presented together with 19 short papers, one keynote and 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to intelligence in the era of Big Data, such as fuzzy logic and control system; genetic algorithm and heuristic approaches; artificial intelligence and machine learning; similarity-based models; classification and clustering techniques; intelligent data processing; feature extraction; image recognition; visualization techniques; intelligent network; cloud and parallel computing; strategic planning; intelligent applications; and intelligent systems for enterprise, government and society.