Application Porfolios and Old Data

At last count we had about 480 applications in our portfolio. The 80/20 rule applies here. We spend about 80% of our time and energy on 20% of those applications. We also have run about 30% availability for our staff to support projects although following our big EMR implementations we are now probably around 15%. The portfolio keeps growing too!

There are a lot of companies out there working to write software to make the hospital experience safer, more efficient, better for physicians and better for patients and they market very aggressively to our business leaders. Fortunately we have process in place to partner with them early on to evaluate these solutions. I can still remember the old days however when a department manager would walk on over to the IS office, drop off a couple of CD's and ask if we could have their software up and running next week. We've come a long way. Now we have IT governance reviewing the major IT investments and other bodies to assist our PMO's and facility specific PM's.

So where is the portfolio growing? We support three acute care facilities and they often have different application solutions for the same problems. We can sometimes achieve standardization between them but only when the departments see value in collaboration. Even when we do achieve collaboration or the time comes to swap out an application something has to be done with the old one or more specifically the old data. We need to archive it. We have to keep it around.

This creates weird artifacts like flat file dumps of data that get shoved into Oracle database. Applications up and running without support maintenance agreements because the end-users still like the old front end. Data conversion routines that leave some minute field leftover. Requests for 130 reports against a legacy database and engagement of vendors who specialize in taking old regulatory data and making it available.

It's wacky and it keeps our portfolio from shrinking. I'm curious to hear if anyone out there has a better solution.... Seriously....