This bottom-up process of incremental improvement relies on letting workers change the way they do things if it leads to better results.

ECONOMIST: The land of disappointments

Many police chiefs are now fluent in management-speak, happily swapping notes on skills competency, leadership and process improvement- and hurrah for that.

BBC: What do we value about the police?

Over the past decade there has been growing international agreement that the system for linking science and policy in the area of biodiversity and ecosystem services needed further improvement, resulting ultimately in the process for creating an Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

UNESCO: Social and Human Sciences

So much of the rationale in having a CIO take on another area of responsibilities is the need for process improvement in the new area, or the need to leverage technology better in the new area, or to identify ways in which setting standards or centralizing to a greater degree might reduce costs.

FORBES: CIO-plus Series: Interview with Karl Salnoske, the EVP of Service Delivery and CIO of GXS

The international observer missions say that the newly implemented election law is a big improvement on the past, but they say it should be seen only as the beginning of the reform process.

CNN: STORY HIGHLIGHTS

That's a big improvement from the 1970s, when Sidney Loeb at the University of California, Los Angeles, was working on a process to desalinate water and came up with the idea of using osmosis to generate power.

FORBES: Getting Power From Salty Water