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The ideas and findings in this report should not be construed as an official DoD position. It is published in the interest of scientific and technical information exchange. Review and Approval This report has been reviewed and is approved for publication.

Although the Latino American male population is increasing, the subgroup Latino men's health remains underinvestigated. This study examined the overall pattern of Latino male health and health care utilization in major subgroups, using a nationally representative sample (N = 1,127) from the National Latino and Asian American Study. The authors evaluated rates of chronic, behavioral, and mental health service utilization in this first nationally representative survey. The results identified significant cross-subgroup differences in most physical and chronic conditions with Puerto Rican American men having high rates in 8 of 15 physical ailments, including life-altering conditions such as cardiovascular diseases. Despite differences in racial/ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural factors, Cuban American men shared similar rates of heart diseases and cancer with Puerto Rican American men. In addition, Puerto Rican American men had higher rates of substance abuse than other Latinos. For health providers, the authors' findings encourage awareness of subgroup differences regarding overall health issues of Latino American men to provide culturally appropriate care. KeywordsLatino American men, chronic, behavioral and mental health, service seeking, health care utilization, National Latino and Asian American Study, NLAAS

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Organizations are now competing in two markets, one for their products and services and one for the talent required to produce or perform them. An organization's success in its business markets is determined by its success in the talent market. At the very time that business markets are expanding, talent markets seem to be shrinking. As the knowledge required to build products and deliver services increases, the retention of experienced employees becomes critical to improving productivity and time to market. In areas such as software development and nursing, the shortage of talent is so great that companies are beginning to offer incentives that were once available only to executives or professional athletes. In every domain of business, executives know that their ability to compete is directly related to their ability to attract, develop, motivate, organize, and retain talented people.Yet the people-related challenges of the business stretch far beyond recruiting and retention.Competing for talent and recruiting the best is not enough, and focusing just on winning the "talent wars" can be damaging to the organization [Pfeffer 01]. As agility in responding to continual change in technological and business conditions has become critical to success, organizations must strive to create learning environments capable of rapidly adjusting to the changes engulfing them. A critical component of agility is a workforce with the knowledge and skills to make rapid adjustments and the willingness to acquire new competencies. In fact, an agile workforce may reduce some of the stress currently being experienced as a talent shortage.Organizations have attempted to apply many different techniques in their efforts to move toward strategic human capital management. They combine downsizing with restructuring, apply reengineering or process improvement, clearly communicate the organization's mission, improve information sharing, institute employee involvement programs, establish formal complaint-resolution procedures, institute gain-sharing or other incentive plans, emphasize the importance of training the workforce, formalize performance management and feedback processes, perform job or work analysis and design, support job rotation, begin to establish team-based work designs, retrain employees to meet changing demands, provide flexible work arrangements, address diversity issues, conduct formal mentoring programs, and align business and human resource strategies [Becker 96, Becker 98, Mirvis 97]. What many organizations lack is a framework for implementing these advanced practices.vi | CMU/SEI-2009-TR-003 People Capability Maturity Model ® FrameworkThe People Capability Maturity Model® (People CMM®) is a tool to help you successfully address the critical people issues in your organization. The People CMM employs the process maturity framework of the highly successful Capability Maturity Model® for Software (SW-CMM®) [Carnegie Mellon University 95] as a foundation for a model of best practices for managing and developing an organi...

Engineering processes and methodologies used in building tomorrow's systems must place a greater emphasis on designing usable systems that meet the needs of the systems' users and their tasks. This paper identifies the need for defining human factors and human-computer interaction (HCI) engineering activities that contribute to the design, development, and evaluation of usable and useful interactive systems, and presents a rationale for integrating these activities with software engineering and incorporating them into the system life cycle.

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New graduates are often placed into project management roles, but may face challenges in these roles. This study surveyed managers from Brazilian organizations and gathered information on the environment, practices and results of projects where new graduates were in project management roles. In-depth interviews were executed with a subset of these managers to further collect insights into issues surrounding new graduates’ performance in project management. This paper examines the preparation and performance of new graduates in project management roles. It addresses specific project management skills and competencies that are involved in delivering successful projects and how these relate to project success or failure. The conclusions determined that new graduates are often not fully prepared for project management roles and fail to conduct comprehensive project preparations, often missing risk management; their soft skills are not fully developed creating further challenges; and the corporate environment towards project management may not lead to developing well-prepared project managers.