Social Networking - Integrating People Engineering Applications

As you may know, WorldAPP is the originator of IDEAS - Integrated Data Engineering Applications.

But maybe there is room out there for another company to focus on IPEAS 0r Integrated People Engineering Applications?

Sure, it is not nearly as sexy an acronym, but social networking is certainly now the new red hot space. Yesterday over lunch, one of our business analysts was proclaiming how he had just succumbed and become a "Twitter" the previous night. His friend had finally managed to explain to him the value of looking at himself as a "product" and using Twitter to keep those who might be interested in him as a "product" up-to-date – all this in easy-to-digest 140 character bites of information.

Certainly, here at WorldAPP, we are both aware and excited that companies will soon be asking us to integrate relevant information from Linked In, Facebook and other data repositories into their next IDEA.

Data is data after all and it is the quality and value of data, not the database or structure that houses it, that truly matters from a business efficiencies perspective.

Personal Health Records (PHR) may drive data initiatives in healthcare

I just read an interesting article by Pat Speer in Information Management Magazine. The author points out that data integration initiatives around health care are hot topics today.

Certainly it is needed.

According to EMC, fewer than 10 percent of America's 5,000 hospitals and 17 percent of its 800,000 doctors have digitized their patients' records. The smaller the practice, the less likely an investment has been made in EHR (Electronic Health Records) technology.

I find this astounding. How will this transformation in healthcare take place? I believe the consumer (aka the “informed patient”) will be the spark plug that gets this behemoth moving forward. Health insurers, progressive HMOs and technology savvy medical practices will begin to recognize the convergence of easily accessible EHR and PHR (Personal Health Records) as their most valuable opportunity to become a trusted source to their members.

Speer points out that Aetna for example, with over 12 million members, is a poster child for this progressive movement. Aetna's health information management systems and electronic medical records are now fully integrated.

They started this initiative five years ago, according to their head of e-health product management Dan Greden. "At that time” Greden says, “we had 1 million members who had a PHR [personal health record] available to them. With the most rapid increase seen in the last 15 months, today we have close to 9 million members taking advantage of this program."

This is heady stuff. It’s an omen of a huge tectonic shift that’s about to happen around data integration within the healthcare industry. A space I fully expect WorldAPP to play a major role in.

Meanwhile I only have to walk into my local GP and be handed a sheaf of redundant forms to fill out and immediately I can see a whole bunch of IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications) that would make this fragmented health care process run better.

Can't wait!


http://www.information-management.com/issues/2007_59/health_care_third_party_data_management_warehousing-10015489-1.html

Now that I think of it - the report design dilemma

I am no technology buff. So any esoteric conversation you have with me about the pros and cons of traditional RDBMS vs. newer DBMS architectures will most likely be a very short one. There will be a lot of silent nodding and quiet chin rubbing. Luddite though I be, I do profess to know a winner when I see one and QlikView from QlikTech, one of WorldAPP’s premier integration partners in the BI space, appears to be a monster by any estimation.

Boris Evelson, who writes for Information Management Magazine, has written an erudite blog on this, and, though I paraphrase it here, I urge you to read his brilliant homily in full. I even enjoyed the parts I didn't understand.

In essence, Evelson's treatise lowers the boom on the mile-wide gap between BI tools that require you to know in advance exactly what kind of reports you want in a report (in his parlance this is known as pre-discovery of data, aka data integration and data modeling) and BI tools, like QlikView, that allow you to create virtual data models on-the-fly because everything is already indexed in memory.

The advantages of the latter are easy to grasp by anyone who has just delivered a report to spec only to hear a C level mandariin mumur "I'd like to see this data another way".

To his credit, Evelson is even-handed in his analysis and points out other issues that still need resolution, but it certainly looks like any IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications) that WorldAPP builds for our customers using QlikView's BI engine is going to serve them very well in the future.

Evelson's article can be found at:
http://www.information-management.com/blogs/business_intelligence_bi-10015454-1.htmlce_bi-10015454-1.html

IDEAS and Gaussian Distribution

One of the intriguing questions around the world of IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications) is what technologies are going to fold into it's core functionality most rapidly? If one were to map potential integratable technologies within the framework of a typical Gaussian distribution which ones would hover atop the bell curve?

Early interest from WorldAPP's customers does seem to center around forms, workflow, IVR, and other multi-modal data collection schemas involving scanning and even snail mail. Predictable enough you might say.

But who out there is going to be a real game changer? My bet is on a hardware company called Plastic Logic that is solving a critical piece of the "affordability" and "durability" challenge in field data collection. Take a look at this revolutionary concept http://www.plasticlogic.com/news/video.php .

This company gets it.