Back in the (Blogging) Saddle

After a week and a half of intensity at work and intensity at home I'm about to get back in the saddle again. If you have for some reason followed my twitter posts recently they are mostly about bread and chicken coops. The work-life balance tipped away from work for a while and it's been nice. I find that once I refuel like this my mind starts looking up and around again vs the heads down daily grind that can come after intense periods of work.

Work has been intense. Strategy development, team building, infrastructure projects and new technology evaluations abound. I like to get deep into a topic, obsess about it and know as much as I can in the time I have. I then come back up for air and a reality check and figuring out how much of each is needed to keep the momentum going requires more art than science right now.

So a colleague of mine gave me a few articles to read recently and I took the opportunity in a longish large meeting to scan them and it spawned a few ideas.

• An article on the effect of compensation on collaboration (negative in most cases) got cross pollinated with what I'm learning about the National Quality Forum's likely future direction on hospital metrics.
• Build vs buy on the Business Intelligence front in payor organizations. What are the lesson's learned for providers and how does that relate to emerging trends on data aggregation vendors as opposed to traditional Business Intelligence vendors.
• The economic recovery legislation and it's impact on adoption of EMRs and even more importantly the execution of those projects.

Today was a good reminder to stop, pay attention to everything going on around me and not just focus on the next steps and the plan. If you don't stop and smell the roses then you might just miss something important...

(Not) Lost in Translation

Today I was given a fine compliment and told that I was a translator. After writing about having to "traverse the stack" and Business Intelligence as a bad word it felt good to hear evidence that bridging the gap between the technical world and the healthcare world is doable by mere humans. Like many things in our culture this talent isn't nurtured early enough and it seems that the school of hard knocks is the primary teacher. For example, how many computer science programs emphasize non-technical writing, non-academic presentation and business skills? It's been a while since I got my Bachelors Degree but I don't see the core of these programs doing a good job in this area.

There are a few ways to try and get there faster. A double major in business management, communications or an MBA. In fact many of the best and most effective translators I know got their MBAs early in their careers and I admire their grace. In a pinch though an organization can help this happen by cultivating these skills internally, not slaying people for making mistakes and committing to the development of their people. These things will evolve into part of a hard-wired culture of learning and culture definitely eats strategy for lunch!

Back to sharpening the saw...

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?

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...

Unexpected Benefits of Blogging

I've discovered a few unexpected benefits of blogging about my worklife that I thought I'd share...

• It reinforces my optimism. I blog to write and as my college writing teach said, "writing is an inherently public and creative act". I can brood if left to my own thoughts alone but the creative process doesn't allow for brooding much and the public act of writing doesn't allow me to feel alone much.
• It allows me to collect, synthesize and assemble thoughts that would otherwise remain unrelated. I'm rarely able to sit down and tackle a single topic when writing a new post. Several things swim around in my head at the same time. This may be because I scan my google reader account (see the newsreel box on the right) usually before blogging. The thoughts of a lot of extremely intelligent people get stirred around with thoughts about my day and memories. They sometimes stick to each other like Velcro.
• Strangely enough I can use it to avenge the evil exploits of my colleagues. For example, I have my Windows Mobile cellphone setup to post directly to this blog. Today I took a picture of one of my colleagues eating an egg salad sandwich. This was in revenge for her giving me a hard time relentlessly a week ago. Now, at the touch of a button I can post that picture for anyone to see. I probably won't though, unless she gives me a hard time for blogging again.