Lower Prevalence Chronic Conditions

In collaboration with CDD and CDC, Concept Systems Inc. asked participants to help them understand the key issues relating to the role of public health agencies in addressing lower prevalence chronic conditions. What follows is a summary of the results of that assessment project. It provides a conceptual framework which agencies in both the private and public sectors can use to understand how public health can address these conditions.

Health and Aging

Last year, State Health Departments and State Units on Aging completed The Aging States Project: Promoting Opportunities for Collaboration Between the Public Health and Aging Services Networks. This needs assessment identified many opportunities for the public health and aging networks to work together to improve the health of older adults. The assessment provided valuable information about what state health departments and state units on aging require to address healthy aging effectively, and what barriers exist.

Mapping Organizational Improvement: From Strategy to Evaluation

A detailed look at performance management and the performance management capabilities of The Concept System and the CS Application Suite.  This paper was presented at the 1998 International Conference of the International Society for Performance Improvement, Chicago, Illinois, March 25, 1998.

Conceptualizing Training Using Concept Mapping and Pattern Matching

This paper provides a comprehensive description of how Concept Systems methods and processes can be integrated within a corporate university to enable high-quality efficient planning and evaluation of training.

Selecting the Concept System for Managing and Measuring Human Performance

This paper offers an objective assessment of The Concept System as a tool for managing and measuring human performance.  It describes exhaustive research conducted at Andersen Consulting to select the methodology most appropriate for performance management. And the answer was...The Concept System!

Concept Mapping for Organizational Creativity

Much of the material in this paper was originally included in my responses to a series of questions about corporate creativity and how it could be enhanced. The questions were posed by Ian Rose, President of IBR Consulting Services Ltd. and my answers were to be edited along with others into a single report given to a select group of corporate sponsors. After reviewing my responses, Ian felt that my discussion of concept mapping would be more coherent and useful if it was removed from the original question-and-answer structure of the report and repackaged into this stand-alone document that could be distributed along with the larger report.

Estimating Financial Returns of Performance Interventions

This paper provides a detailed exposition of how to estimate Return On Investment (ROI) using Concept Systems tools.  One problem with estimating ROI concerns how you compute the benefits that are uniquely due to your intervention or training program.  Cost accounting and experimental approaches to accomplishing this are expensive and are based on numerous assumptions.  Here, we describe a simple Delphi procedure that involves a group of stakeholders in estimating benefits and allows us to check consensus. Another problem is that typical ROI work estimates returns assuming that your organization performs perfectly -- certainly an unlikely scenario. Here, The CS Performer is used to estimate a more reasonable return rate based on how your organization is currently performing.

Forget ROI: Measure "Return on Expectations"

A warning about the fallabilities of trying to estimate Return On Investment and the value of looking at Return On Expectations.

Concept Mapping of Evaluation Outcomes

In evaluation or performance assessment, one of the most difficult challenges is identifying a comprehensive framework for outcome measurement.  This paper shows how concept mapping can be used to help stakeholders map outcomes and use the map as the basis for development of logic models, development of specific measures and metrics, and evaluation and reporting of results.