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Traditional strategic planning too often results in incremental change focused more on next year's budget than on creative growth and sustainable development. Leadership teams struggle to “paint with two brushes”: building in transformative change while maintaining current operations. To transcend existing systems and achieve their organization's unique vision, healthcare leaders must embrace uncertainty and incorporate flexibility into their long-term planning. They must prepare for a range of potential futures—while maintaining current operations—because agility and adaptability are what will define future success. Transformative Planning: How Your Healthcare Organization Can Strategize for an Uncertain Future explains how leadership teams can lay the groundwork for new, transformational healthcare delivery models while simultaneously meeting the requirements of today. Author Jim Austin shares the essential frameworks, tools, and processes for developing and implementing long-term strategic and execution plans that embrace uncertainty. The book's four-step model for transformational change covers: Mental models, decision making, and decision trapsVision and strategic prioritiesStrategy development and scenario planningExecution frameworkLeadership teams and governing boards at healthcare organizations of all kinds will find Transformative Planning to be an essential guide to planning strategically for today and tomorrow.

This book focuses on how to lead transformative and strategic change in the healthcare industry in times of great uncertainty. Written for senior healthcare leaders, it will provide new tools, processes, examples and case studies offering an effective framework in which to transform healthcare systems. Specifically, leaders will be able to answer the following questions: • Why change? What has led us to today, and what is the current situation in healthcare? • What to change? What areas for change are most promising—areas with the greatest potential to yield significant benefits?• How to change? Will incremental changes meet the need, or are true transformations required? • When to change? Should changes start now, or should change wait for the stars to come into some special alignment? Healthcare is personal. Healthcare is local. And at the same time, healthcare is one of the greatest challenges faced by countries around the world. All major economies confront similar issues: “demand-side” growth in the care of aging populations in the face of “supply-side” resource constraints driven by ever-increasing costs of providing such care. While cultural, historical, and political differences among nations will yield different solutions, healthcare leaders across the globe must deal with ever-increasing uncertainty as to the scope and speed of their healthcare systems'evolution. The magnitude of these challenges calls for fundamental change to address inherent problems in the healthcare system and ensure sustainable access to healthcare for generations to come. The problem is understanding where and how to change. Failures of strategy are often failures to anticipate a reality different than what organizations are prepared or willing to see. Both system-wide and organizational transformation means doing current activities more efficientlywhile layering on change. This book aims to provide leaders with the tools to help organizations and health care systems adapt and evolve to meet the new challenges of healthcare as it continues to evolve.Praise for Leading Strategic Change in an Era of Healthcare Transformation'The authors make the case for healthcare transformation, and more importantly outline the required steps from changing mindsets to opinions development...a useful guide for all future healthcare leaders.'- John A. Quelch, Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School'There are several lifetimes of knowledge in the book about leading strategic transformation in the healthcare sector... Strategic transformation requires 2 ingredients: expertise in the healthcare sector and knowledge about leading change. This volume accomplishes both.'- Karen Hein, Former President of the William T. Grant Foundation, Adjunct Professor of Family & Community Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School and Visiting Fellow, Feinstein International Center, Tufts University'An essentialguide for healthcare leaders seeking to transform their organization in these demanding times.'- Dr. Mario Moussa, President, Moussa Consulting and co-author of The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas and Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance

The focus of the Asian Applied Computing Conference (AACC) is primarily to bring the research in computer science closer to practical applications. The conference is aimed primarily at topics that have immediate practical bene?ts. By hosting the conf- ence in the developingnations in Asia we aim to provide a forum for engagingboth the academic and the commercial sectors in that region. The?rst conference “Information Technology Prospects and Challenges” was held in May 2003 in Kathmandu, Nepal. Thisyear theconferencenamewas changedto “Asian AppliedComputingConference” to re?ect both the regional- and the application-oriented nature of the conference. AACC is planned to be a themed conference with a primary focus on a small set of topics although other relevant applied topics will be considered. The theme in AACC 2004 was on the following topics: systems and architectures, mobile and ubiquitous computing, soft computing, man machine interfaces,and innovative applications for the developing world. AACC 2004 attracted 184 paper submissions from around the world, making the reviewing and the selection process tough and time consuming. The selected papers covered a wide range of topics: genetic algorithms and soft computing; scheduling, - timization andconstraintsolving; neuralnetworksandsupportvectormachines;natural language processing and information retrieval; speech and signal processing; networks and mobile computing; parallel, grid and high-performance computing; innovative - plications for the developing world; cryptography and security; and machine lea- ing. Papers were primarily judged on originality, presentation, relevance and quality of work. Papers that had clearly demonstrated results were given preference.

It is generally understood that the present approachs to computing do not have the performance, flexibility, and reliability of biological information processing systems. Although there is a comprehensive body of knowledge regarding how information processing occurs in the brain and central nervous system this has had little impact on mainstream computing so far. This book presents a broad spectrum of current research into biologically inspired computational systems and thus contributes towards developing new computational approaches based on neuroscience. The 39 revised full papers by leading researchers were carefully selected and reviewed for inclusion in this anthology. Besides an introductory overview by the volume editors, the book offers topical parts on modular organization and robustness, timing and synchronization, and learning and memory storage.