Interesting use cases abound for Master Data Management, but few hit as close to home as Medical Health Records. Though known colloquially as Personal Health Records (PHR), Electronic Health Records (EHR) or even as Employee Health Records (also EHR)… there is a substantial need across the care triumvirate (Patient-Provider-Payer) to begin to align content across purposes in a non-leaky way. A very interesting company - MedCommons - has been pushing for a Continuity of Care Record (CCR) designed to help pull digital content “critical to the continuity of care” so that a patient can be transferred across providers with high fidelity. To my “digital” dismay, it seems that the majority of records are hand carried. Just ask an armed forces person about their medical jacket that they hand carry from point-to-point across their care continuum. How absurd is it that online services like Spokio can assemble your online footprint, but no one seems ablidged to offer similar aggregation for the treatment of disease, proactive management of health.

I mean, how stupid that we cannot agree on a non-depricating set of formats and exchanges for the appropriate sharing of health records across participants. Sure there are those worried that pre-existing conditions will impact their ability to receive insurance, or that a PCP may learn of a pre-existing STD that might through loose lips sink a marriage, but these are meerly obstacles in need of the proper application of policy driven “opt-in” authorizations.

At the end of the day, if everything is auditable, my decision to withhold information becomes MY decision, and I’ll need to take responsibility for it. Similarly, a providers/payors access also brings a certain set of responsibilities. In the “trust, but verify” culture to which we are a part, it seems that loose federations, policy management/enforcement/ as well non-repudiable audits and intentional design bear the right set of controls to build these systems.

It is astonishing that providers order additional, oft-repeated tests, for self-protection against malpractice. That providers sit idly by not giving patients the ability to archive and share their disease/treatment portfolios, in a way that might offset large segments of the cost…. if my specialist had a copy of the tests run by my PCP would they ask for a new assay? would it be enough that we could know/record that they viewed the prior results and therefore be absolved of negligence?

I’m sure that I’m oversimplifying, but when does the 80:20 rule take effect, can we save 80% by managing the specific treatment of the 20? I’m not talking about taking unfound risks, but merely about exercising better judgement. With patients surfing the internet, we have to think that an educated “consumer” is a “good” consumer, why not support the broad - population wide - “best treatment” capabilities afforded by statistically significant population… by anonymizing our PHR’s, enabling them to be mined, determining which diagnostics were deterministic (and which wastefull) , which treatments produced the best outcomes and what the options are.

Here we are with 21st century IT in retail lending and personalized advertising. But we, health consumers, seem to be counting on the limited experience of our physicians as the only director of our own mortality, when let’s face it, the analytic resources and data does exist. Why don’t insurance style actuarial analysis make it into our own wellness management portfolios, helping us consumers lead more healthy lives - enabling the “smart consumer” the choice that they desire…. not choice assembled by the griping few, or the chance of a caring soul who shares a disease and blogs their experience, but rather on an industry that takes the initiative to make a broad push to improve the 80%, and who knows this probably applies to the trailing 20% as well.

Spoken by a dad, whose spouse has spent countless nights researching diseases based upon observed symptoms, leading her to substantial enlightenment. This knowledge, in turn has, more than once, provided her with information that our family’s PCP didn’t have the time to accumulate through either experience or training.

Technorati Tags: healthcare, master content management

Technorati Tags: cdi, distributed system, information infrastructure, mdm, truisms

I have long said that the failure of SOA programs has to do more with politics of data/process ownership than the technologies on which you build these enterprise SOA initiatives. Furthermore, that the failure to address the information models as first class citizens in a Service Oriented Architecture presents huge risks to both adoption and down stream architectural stability.

As background, working for an Information Infrastructure company, and having worked from a “computer company” in the past, the realization is startling wrt. how easy it is to “re platform” and application (note Sun’s precipitous decline in the face of Linux) vs. re-platform it’s data… after all: Computers are worthless if they have no data to process. And to further this point, as processors got faster, at a rate much higher than the busses that fed them, they became more like space heaters. On the other hand, the information supply chain has grown in relevance as technologies like de-duplication, parallel readers, advanced caching algorythms and even flash disks prove to have a more substantial impact on timeliness of result and thus architectural criticality.

So what does that background have to do with our story? Well all businesses are being told to do more with less; investments are being targeted to deliver real ROI as measured in Revenue, and to some extent, though SOA enabled processes support the automation of processing paths, the programs that I have seen fall short in that traditional SOA offers enterprises the OO promise of a singular Service (first class) which is responsible for Employees, Customers, Accounting, the business unit functions, and this falls short when you ask the simple question… but really who owns the “Customer”… Okay so now everyone raises their hand… the problem now becomes one not of a singular service, but the federation of capabilities across systems exposed through a consistent interface… all well and good until you ask: what is the information model upon which these interactions act. Again, the political fight ensues as to who has the best model, to which there is no answer except the one “whomever has the money makes the rules”… okay so sales wins. No really, SOA needs to become substantially more grounded in information modeling and Model transformational techniques with the recognition that there will never be a single canonical model for the business. But, how do we navigate across these models? EIM(MDM)/EII(MDM) techniques of course? But as we build these transforms to move from model A to model B potentially through some canonical intermediate, we need to concern our self with the impact of changes models included within the orchestration… enter model governance. Yes, the G-word. Governance seems to be the impossible cross-matrixing of staff to produce some semblance of order within a process in which politics, unknowns and of course expectations wreak havoc on the scientific method. One of the critical expectations which needs to be continually addressed is timely-ROI, you have but 6 months to demonstrated tangible evidence of success or you risk losing support… now back to the software development/SOA domain.

eSOA programs have long put waterfall methodologies out of vogue because they seemed to lack “pace and progress” to this end tight spiral RUP based methodologies and even the Agile methods have come into vogue. Learning from that, there is an opportunity for Information Architects to emerge that don’t boil the ocean, but do through an iterative and constructive process continually refine the models, transforms, interactions, accessory/usage policies, stewarding mechanisms that are required to improve consistency (think SEI/CMM scale). Sure, it’s a never ending journey, but at least you don’t get too far away from the business to be viewed as a field of dreams (inconsequential). To this end “Agile Data Governance” is coming into vogue, alongside the realization that SOA, like IT is about the information, and forgetting that we are doomed to follow in the footsteps of failed efforts.

Technorati Tags: cdi, change management, distributed system, information infrastructure, mdm, soa

I have long been a fan of Peter Deutsch’s fallacies (btw I’m not alone, Google this AM produced over 22k references) of network/distributed computing, they have served as a set of guiding checkpoints for every distributed system that I have built. What I have found to be missing, however, is a similar set of fallacies/truisms for managing Information while we approach “internet scale” information infrastructure… the information explosion.

Truisms defined by/principles for managing information explosion:

1. no one person/system is capable of managing all data
2. optimizations will be continually applied, but by different vendors, thereby requiring an enterprise to distribute their information architecture
3. information processing is inherently a pipelined process (though fork/join supports parallelism for reduction of latency)
4. these pipeline’s can have “in parallel” replicas so long as sufficient locking is engineered, and compensation models supported
5. locking for a given pipeline should be owned discretely by a single application context (workflow) - though this workflow may be complex, it is stateless upon completion of end state
6. loose coupling / jit integration require coherent, federable, data dictionaries and meta-data/structure maps

Translated to Fallacies… which, agreeing with SGG, I think are way more powerful, and in some cases hilarious.

1. there is one enterprise data architect who is responsible for the master models
2. there is a system who is the authoritative master for a given entity domain
3. there is one vendor involved across the SOA and EIM domain
4. the data models are largely fixed, and the business will not ask for further changes/enhancements to the model
5. data exchange will be based upon XA/2-phase transactional mechanisms to achieve ACID properties (pessimistic transactionality)
6. there will be a singular data dictionary, with complete meta-data for a given entity domain

Additions/Subtractions/debate most wanted!

Technorati Tags: distributed system, information infrastructure, truisms

Tom Maguire pointed me to an interesting podcast from Marty Moseley, CTO of Initiate Systems, one of 2 remaining leadership quadrant companies in CDI & MDM (the other being Siperian). Marty wanes relatively eloquently on this “third pass” at MDM, and the challenges that MDM faces/addresses within a SOA/BPM oriented set of orchestrated activities.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-and-SOA/Orchestrating-Your-Data/

My take, nothing outlandish or incredibly insightful, but does give a primer to the value of MDM within a SOA…

Technorati Tags: cdi, mdm, soa

So there has been much ado from commercial technologists, analysts and press about the emergence of SOA as a silver bullet in the defining of a common Enterprise / Inter-Enterprise Service model, and in an approach to the re-factoring of existing legacy systems. Though there are almost as many approaches to SOA as there are articles defining and re-defining the terms, one of the critical lessons is that SOA will only yield as much agility as the infrastructure upon which it runs.

Coming from a history of grid/utility computing programs has afforded me the benefit of viewing enterprise resources as consistent modelable elements that can create a virtual deployment infrastructure for this next generation of agile enterprise services. What remains critical, and a common theme in my weblog has been the need to better elaborate the systemic requirements of a system - whether represented by a single service interface, or through a composite model, service level objectives remain a difficult to define, more difficult to measure, and virtually impossible to predictably enforce set of goals. A recent read of the Enterprise Grid Alliances “Reference Model” is illuminating; as I think that the industry, through GGF, EGA, DTMF UCWG, SNIA and even eTOM are getting close to a basic taxonomy in which a SOA is deployed (hopefully dynamically) against a Service Oriented Infrastructure (SOI). So what am I really saying? Model Driven Architecture is attempting to establish consistent patterns for the organization of object oriented services, with clear separation of concern, and appropriate compositional granularity. SOA’s are constructed through Directed Acyclic Graphs of these sub-systems that define their inter-relationship (though the complete vocabulary isn’t standardized). Now that we understand the components that make up an enterprise service, we need to determine how to apply these models against infrastructure, and once again MDA can serve us well.

Let’s take our infrastructure (pools of elemental resources) that can also be dynamically assigned, are themselves objects, which can leverage similar model based approaches to their organization we quickly begin to recognize the need for both “extension” - supporting a consistent interface to a domain model, whilst enabling the customization that is a natural byproduct of real-life variability. Models, for me are a composition of patterns that provide layered abstraction to mitigate complexity and support replacement… These models are really purpose built realizations of patterns based upon a set of concrete contexts - a complicated way describing constraint driven pattern application…. I want to remodel my bathroom, to build a plan I need to take existing patterns from some kind of “standard” catalog, and apply them given my constrains… I’m tall, so I want the countertops raised, I’m disabled so I need to extend the natural 18“ on center rule for toilet spacing to 36” for access… you get the picture. By producing models (either abstract or concrete) we can begin to elaborate a design, manifesting all of the complexity within a set of stackable “layers” that ensures both loose coupling/east of replacement, along with the traceability against requirements and constraints.

So finally to VOA or “Virtualization Oriented Architectures”; architectures built with clear layer based / atomicallly separable abstractions… VOAs are Models in which abstraction can be late bound, but coherently orchestrable designs. These designs need to describe the “virtualization” constraints in a way that deployment contexts can be manifest at runtime rather than design time, through a more consistent set of abstraction layers/patterns that reflect the platform layer, service layer that you wish to virtualize. In lay terms… virtualization provides a component and a container that inherently provides the lifecycle management of that component. For VOA to work (as SOA) the functional capabilities as well as the non-functional or systemic capabilities need to be declared at design time, and then contractually provided at runtime.

Technorati Tags: distributed system, soa, virtualizatoin

Wow am I remiss for not posting this article sooner…

SAP has agreed to include data federation tools from Informatica with some of its enterprise resource planning and analytics products.

The combination of the two products is intended to help customers analyze data stored in third-party or legacy systems. It also solves a marketing problem for SAP, as the applications from Informatica will help the company sell into larger enterprises with heterogeneous environments.

Under the terms of their agreement, SAP will embed Informatica’s PowerCenter, PowerExchange and Metadata Manager software into its performance management and business analytic applications and the NetWeaver platform for master data management and business intelligence.

My take: SAP is going head to head with Oracle… Oracle has been acquiring EIM assets at a rapid clip with Sunopsis and Hyperion, SAP has been building their own NetWeaver based BI offering, but there was huge traction with Hyperion to provide the enterprise wide integrated reporting so key to leveraging SAP’s information, but alas, this is no more. Now SAP must figure out how to fill that gap with an existing enterprise domain player to empower their own offer… enter Informatica. Hmmmm….

As many know HP announced it’s intention to buy OpsWare for $1.45B on Monday (7/23/2007). Some seem think that they are just buying into a negative cash flow business. My gut, tells me that OpsWare has had problems because deeper management software integration (OpenView) and HW integration would help them to create multiplicative value in operational efficiency; easing the “we’d buy it if it were just a little more integrated” denial.

So let me just play devils advocate… HP has been investing in virtualization/grid technologies… see HP SFS basically a bundled “storage grid that is Lustre ready, supporting 35+GB/s performance (ether) and 1PB of capacity built from small boxes (hp’s quote: ”3X the bandwidth at half the price of scalable NFS offerings.“)… Sun is trying the same thing with Constellation and their x4500 (thumpers), the challenge that we all have is that vertical scale brings systemness, but on a non-commodity price curve. The commodity/sedimentation / scale out architectures, however have a dirty little secret, as you scale out the complexity of management becomes high, and their provision becomes more rigid because of this… impacting capital arbitrage and schedulable density (fancy ways of saying, I have to lock apps to boxes to ensure that I can manage, instead of allowing apps to be dynamically scheduled to available resources (compute, network and storage).

In fact, what grid technologies do is add systemness to compute fabrics, and are hugely complimentary to existing virtualization / abstraction layers like VMware and Xen. So for me, Opsware is a ”platform“ that can help HP control the migration of their customers from static deployments/manual processes -> static deployments/automated processes -> dynamic deployments/automated processes.

I think that we’ll see other activity soon around BladeLogic from the like of BMC and IBM. The gauntlet has been thrown down!

Technorati Tags: distributed system, hp, network management

Finally…. (thanks John Walton for the heads up)

Longbow XR allows arbitrarily distant InfiniBand fabrics to communicate at full bandwidth through 10Gbits/s Wide Area Networks. The WAN connection is managed out of band, and except for flight time induced latency is transparent to the InfiniBand hardware, stacks, operating systems and applications.
XR achieves flow control by shaping WAN traffic and managing buffer credits to ensure extremely high efficiency bulk data transfers — including RDMAs — making the system a highly effective transport mechanism for very large data sets between geographically separated InfiniBand equipment.

Read More

Technorati Tags: fabrics, infiniband, networks

I was recently asked to contribute to a couple of articles(The Merging of SOA and Web 2.0,Experts See Link Between Virtualization, SOA) by Darryl Taft of eWeek(Ziff Davis). I initially took an excessively “SOI” approach to this discussion only to have a conversation with Steve Graham that really helped me establish a more realistic set of comments around the junction between Web2.0 (with it’s requisite behavioral challenges around collaboration, composition and empowerment/personalization), and my natural slant toward SOA - namely the changing dynamics of system composition with a strong bent toward “systemness” or NFR’s.
The quote is certainly more accurately attributed to sgg, but is certainly a collaboration!
Thanks Steve!

Technorati Tags: distributed system, rest, soa, ws

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