Over the past 20 years, root cause analysis (RCA) has become one of the most widely used retrospective methods for detecting safety hazards in medicine and healthcare. Despite its wide use in management practice and growing popularity in academic research, there is currently a dearth of coverage of RCA in popular healthcare management textbooks…

The National College Access Network (NCAN) and Exponent Partners have teamed up on a two-part report series aimed at helping organizations to become more data-driven. NCAN members have increasingly incorporated research, data, and evaluation into their critical work of serving low-income, first-generation students on their way to postsecondary…

This teaching case discusses the analysis of an electronic voting system. The development of the case was motivated by research into information security and management, but as it includes procedural aspects, organizational structure and personnel, it is a suitable basis for all aspects of systems analysis, planning and design tasks. The material…

The reliability of data is a critical issue in decision-making for practitioners in the school. Percent Agreement and Cohen's kappa are the two most widely reported indices of inter-rater reliability, however, a recent Monte Carlo study on the reliability of multi-category scales found other indices to be more trustworthy given the type of data…

The N=1 analysis differs from a typical analysis of variance in that there is no within-cell error term. Thus interaction terms are used as estimates of error variance. If the interaction term in question represents a significant interaction, the F tests will be conservative. Tukey's test for nonadditivity will detect a common form of interaction.…

Software design is still a craft; techniques are based on the way things have been done, not on basic theorems or design principles. Suggests that academic software design needs to be more like a science or technology and that a taxonomy of design solutions or classification method is required. Describes two case studies. (MLW)