The Wisdom of Crowds vs The Black Swan

I am fascinated by the potential of dynamically integrating data. No surprise here I suppose as WorldAPP's business is focused on developing IDEAS (Integrated Data Engineering Applications).

There are some dimensions to data integration however that are truly unique to this moment in man's history. And it all has to do with the web.

One is the compression of time between events and another is a universally accessible compendium of collective responses. A frivolous example of this would be millions of fans voting on American Idol during the show. A more gripping example, one that I have availed of, are the real time tweets coming in from the streets of Tehran as terrified Iranian citizens are being beaten up by the notoriously brutal Basij militia.

Sitting by the quiet waters of Rhode Island, I now know what is happening on an exact street in Tehran as it is happening.

Creatively integrating such dynamic data into meaningful composites will be the great "game" of this new "Thumbs" generation. Many amazingly fertile amalgams will be happening both across social networks and within business processes.

My interest in all of this does not rest solely at the data engineering flash point, but also at the data validation point. Gathering, integrating and presenting data from multiple data repositories is becoming extraordinarily simple. However, making wise decisions about the "meaning" of this data has not seen the equivalent exponential advance.

Technology is limited here. At the end of the day, computers are still dumb. We are still sniffing our way out of the cave and trying to sense the whereabouts of menacing predators.

Some interesting efforts however are now surfacing to try and leverage this "wisdom of crowds" in order to ratchet down our level of risk. Piqqem being one. Piqqem is an online stock selection service that leverages the wisdom of crowds. Launched last year by early-stage Apple investor Mike Markula and TellMe Networks founder Mike McCue, Piqqem encourages users to make predictions on stock prices with simple graphical icons or using online graphing charts.

Nice IDEA. From such "wisdom", the theory is that we will get qualitatively better stock predictions.

However there is always another side to the coin.

Such an effort would be vocally disputed by Nassim Taleb, author of "The Black Swan." Taleb contends that in such deliberations we will always omit "the highly improbable consequential event". Or more precisely our inability to predict outliers will always imply our inability to predict the course of history. (The current global meltdown would one such example that no one saw coming).

Data being such a beautifully fungible commodity, who is right in this dispute, is probably less important to WorldAPP, and to you, than what is pragmatically the best course of action.

Being a battle-scarred entrepreneur, I tend to side with Taleb, and would advise you don't bet the farm, even if you have conjured up the most elegant IDEA the world has ever seen.

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

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.