About the Authors

Bijay K. Jayaswal holds a B.Eng. (Hons.) degree in electrical engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, and an MBA and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Aston University in England. He is the CEO of Agilenty Consulting Group, LLC. He has held senior executive positions and has consulted in quality and strategy for the last 25 years. His consulting and research interests include value engineering, process improvement, and product development. He has taught engineering and management at the University of Mauritius and California State University, Chico and has directed MBA and Advanced Management programs. He has helped introduce corporate-wide initiatives in reengineering, Six Sigma, and Design for Six Sigma and has worked with senior executive teams to implement such initiatives. He can be contacted at [e-mail].

Dr. Peter C. Patton is Professor of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. He also is Chairman of Agilenty Consulting Group. He has taught at the Universities of Minnesota, Paris, and Stuttgart and has held the position of Chief Information Officer at the University of Pennsylvania. He has engineering and mathematics degrees from Harvard, Kansas, and Stuttgart. He was Chief Technologist at Lawson Software from 1996 to 2002. He was Lawson's representative on the Technical Advisory Committee of IBM's SanFrancisco™ Java Framework project. He has been involved in computer hardware and software development since 1955. He can be contacted at [e-mail].