Warning - Propellerhead Update - Twitter

Alright, I decided to try Twitter out. Inspired by John Halamka's blog I setup a Twitterfeed account too. The goofy part is that I'm twitterfeeding posts from this blog to my twitter account and then using a blogger widget to display my latest tweets at the bottom of my sidebar to the right. This might be fascinating. On top of that I'm also twitterfeeding my Facebook status updates to twitter too.

We'll see how well all of this bailing wire a duct tape works shant we!

P.S. I'm adding a label for propellerhead updates to my blog so that these are easy to identify as notes on tinkering with technology from an ex Oracle DBA.

Brainstorm - Top Uses For Web 2.0 at Work

1. Support Wikis - Real time updated FAQ's for application support, problem solving and simple howtos. This shouldn't replace formal support and triage documentation but should supplement it.
2. Talent/Problem Markets - Offer problems or specific talents/skills online. Staff are rewarded for finding solutions to problems that get results AND for posting problems in the market that then get solved.
3. Management Twitter - Setup management to use a twitter like "what am I doing now" tool that keeps status in a central location. Publish to everyone so that the types of problems that managers are working on can be public. Staff know what management is working on and managers can status each other on what's up without having to setup additional meetings. Harvest comments on the "tweets" to improve employee engagement or offer help.
4. Newsletter Blogs - We're in the 21st century and the time has come to move away from newsletters and towards the modern equivalent. Just as many companies blog their news, updates, celebrations and upcoming work our newsletter could be a ongoing blog with multiple authors (even if we maintained a single editor to maintain quality).
5. Strategic Planning Wiki - Strategic planning for IT often boils down to reviewing the organizational strategic plans and brainstorming the IT internal initiatives and other projects that will support those plans. Open up the brainstorming to EVERYONE including end-users and business participants at every level.
6. Strategic Planning Markets - Unlike the talent/problem markets that utilize a Craig's List like structure for procuring help a strategic planning market would work more like the online election markets that are used to solicit people's projections for election outcomes online or equities markets that set price based on supply and demand. Once strategies and tactics are brainstormed the planning market would then open up voting to project which ones would best support and align with the organization's needs.
7. Review Board Forums - For chartered groups that review projects, proposals, designs or other instruments that benefit from a widely diverse peer review setup forums where topics or threads can be started for each item to be reviewed. Then comments can be harvested after a known deadline and submitted to the authors for consideration in the final draft.
8. Management Blogs - Managers can blog for two purposes. First, to share information on vision, direction, meeting outcomes or other key information that employees are hungry to know and understand. Second, to invite dialogue via blog comments on the information that can happen in a public forum.

Where are you finding success with these tools in your organization?

XML and Richness of Capability

XML (extensible markup language) has been around long enough, more than ten years, to span a generation of employees so it's becoming a technology norm in a lot of respects. The explosion of blogging, RSS and other online services is empowered by this technology. It has its roots in SGML (standardized general markup language) which has it's roots in something called GML that was invented at IBM in the 60s apparently. SGML is widely used in the printing industry and HTML borrowed SGML for it's structure. I wonder if that helped XML and HTML converge over time.

What XML does is very simple. It developers the tools to organize and describe nearly any type of data with a common set of tools. For example, if I wanted to build an application that organized my fishing logs I could build an XML structure that captured every attribute and element of any given log so that they could be easily stored, displayed, shared or queried. The description of this type of XML document is captured in a document type definition or DTD. Other applications can then parse the DTD and know how to store, display share or query the log also. This makes the data self describing and self organizing.

The real power here is that using these techniques and tools creates rich sets of possibilities that can lead to rapidly deploying the data for new capabilities. This richness of capability is what gives a technology or innovation staying power in a rapidly changing world. For example, UNIX has a long and distinguished history going well back into the 60s. The ease with which a UNIX platform can be used to develop and deploy complex services is the key to it's long-term success. At it's heart is the command line interface, a set of simple core commands that can be used to accomplish huge varieties of computing tasks. I have seen healthcare applications built out of the UNIX command line interface by itself. The UNIX command line provides rich capabilities for developers and administrators alike.

Richness of capability enables agility, the ability for a technology to solve a wider set of problems that also extends its useful life and increasing its value. So a rich capability technology probably isn't easily identifiable right out of the gate. Take Java for instance. When Java first came out it promised to solve a wide array of problems including platform dependence, network portability and to further mainstream the use of object oriented programming. It was moderately successful in all of these endeavors but in the final analysis really just becomes another programing language and environment, albeit a popular one. Its capabilities are no more or less rich than other language/environment combinations like .net.

I plan on exploring this idea in future posts. The hypothesis invites a variety of questions like...

• How might you define or measure a rich capability?
• What role does richness of capability play in the evolution of technology?
• To what extent are rich capability technologies incremental or wholesale changes to their previous versions or predecessors?
• What percent of disruptive technologies tend to be rich capability technologies?

Why Business Intelligence is a Bad Word

We're off and running with discovery (in depth evaluation) of an initiative that could be termed Business Intelligence or Analytics but we aren't going to call it that. Business Intelligence has become a bad word and in the never ending quest to support the needs of our hospital administrators we can't afford bad words. The challenge of communication between the clinical and IT communities is much too important. I was once told by an ex-boss that "why?" is my favorite question. Actually "how?" is my favorite. I like to understand things sooooo....

How is it that Business Intelligence became a bad word? In looking back I think there have been a variety of factors.

• Business Intelligence (BI) is a technology label and technology labels are usually dreamt up by salespeople to make product offerings sound cool. Over time best practices cause the labels to refer to some sort of architecture or other anatomy that is recognizable. The label endures however and lacking the newly evolved context suffers.
• Recently in reading an enterprise architecture text the difference between deploying IT solutions vs IT capabilities was highlighted. Deploying IT capabilities is a more forward looking and strategic endeavor. The difference however isn't always clear and when (as I have on occasion) heard IT folks talk about deploying a "robust business intelligence application" the wrong picture emerges. BI is an IT capability and should be treated strategically. Individual projects should focus on solving problems.
• When working with business leaders on developing IT capabilities it's extremely easy to fall into the "solution looking for a problem" trap. Unless the value of the capability can be defined in terms of business value or mitigation of risk it's like telling a joke and forgetting the punchline.

So again the challenge of communication between the clinical and IT world highlights itself. So if you want to start being pro-active and develop IT capabilities you best watch your language.

Blogs In Review

Being a Google blogger user I've been able to pretty easily integrate a few of my other Google tools with it and am rather fond of the result. On the right hand side of my blog you'll note a blogroll and newsreel. These are both imported automagically from my Google reader account that slurps up my favorite blog's articles. Articles that I flag with a star are automatically posted to the newsreel. I also like emailing some of the articles that are especially interesting to folks that I suspect will enjoy them. Here's a few of the characters that I follow these days...

Fred Trotter - I like to think as Fred as the Healthcare IT/FOSS curmudgeon of the group. Given the fact that my favorite comedian is Lewis Black this is definitely a compliment. He posts on lots of topics having to due with free and open source software (FOSS) as an enabler for Healthcare IT at reasonable cost.

Life as a Healthcare CIO - John Halamka's blog. He's sort of a celebrity healthcare CIO with tons of creds and experience. Some of the most interesting things that he blogs about come from his work as the Chair for HITSP (Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel) whose work has the potential to improve integration of HIT systems across the industry. His penchant for dressing in all black reminds me of Neil Diamond for some reason.

Candid CIO - This is the blog of Will Weider who is CIO for a rather large health system. I enjoy his insights on customer service and change management the most.

Not all of my Google reader subscriptions are listed on my blogroll. There are several others as well from places like TechRepublic and even Scientific American, either science and tech research or general industry mags. It's a pretty easy mechanism to catch mostly the news that I want and post it easily to Blueberrytech. Take a gander at the others out there and see what you think...