Present - Evening January 10, 2007

Why Google is Wonderful: This is a short story about IBM. Suppose a business is in a stage of project (organizational change, software development, technology implementation, etc. etc.) maturity where requirements are captured in MS-Word docs that are scattered all over LAN drives. Yet through use case adoption and various other improvements in how things get done, the actual completeness and quality of the requirements has been on a steady uptick. If IBM comes along and presents their Rational tools, and in particular, RequisitePro, the idea of a nice central repository for all this information would be very attractive and look like a real step forward in the management of this critical project information. According to Wikipedia's history of the RUP framework, this toolset probably dates back to the early 90s and perhaps even 80s. The idea of RequisitePro is that you set up a nice project-specific repository structure and load it with a variety of MS-Word docs that the project needs/creates, and then link selected text snippets from the document to a structured database of Requirements Types (all kinds of things are requirements types in this world) and set classification and other attributes by entry or from pick lists. Finally, you can link database elements to one another in value chains of any sort that serves the project. Finally, you can look at all these various project-related information sources using one navigation structure and easily move from one element to another. So what's not to like? Well here's where that historical note comes in. The web has changed the world a good deal since that time. So when the expert Business Analyst is presented with this tantalizing new tool, here is what she is looking for: She would like to enter RQP and type in a search term and within a moment or two be presented with every keyword hit from all projects, all documents, database entries - any field, discussion thread comments, and audit trail records, all sorted in order of relevance. Then she would like to click on the ones she likes and drag them to a space to start her own project repository. [And have the system remember the connection to the original.] Well, software programs from that era don't do that kind of thing. Database searches are SQL queries that return data that you make a report out of and then you can print the report and look at it. Of course, if you set up a query to search every single element of every table, you would likely crash the system for everyone. Oh, that's right, and SQL can't look at MS-Word docs, never mind miscellaneous spreadsheets, diagrams and PDFs that you might attach. She has been working in the world of business applications for years, so where did she get her nutty notions? The answer is so simple. We all google. And the blessed thing about google is that what it does is so simple and obvious that we now think that we should be able to do it everywhere and all the time. [I mentioned the notion of tagging as an alternative to "database attributes" to the IBM sales guys but they brushed me off.] Software is like coffee: it smells so much better while it's dripping than it tastes in your cup.
Cancer Liquifaction: Last night Charlie Rose had cancer researchers as his guests as part of the Charlie Rose Science Series. [If you pop to his site pretty soon you can see photos of his guests.] Each of them seemed to be on a passionate high about the possibilities on the horizon that was very infectious (what a pun- yeech). Why this interested me is that they were in essence talking about the same subject that David Weinberger discusses in his writings. [e.g. Small Things Loosely Joined]. These researchers posit that cancer treatment requires that we gather and organize the breakdown of human genome data, the classification of pharmaceutical and other treatment profiles, the cell behavior of the many different cancerous growths, and the cause-effect relationships that exist among factors. When a person is diagnosed with cancer, the particular subset of each of these factors for that single individual is pulled together in a hypercube of data from which one can project the best treatment approach. [This is a crude layperson's description, of course.] Every individual person needs a unique set of information to get effective treatment. But the essential logic for putting all the pieces together is already or nearly already available. What's missing is the will (and funding) to load the body of reference data and then to break the problems down to the single individual level and add that data to the database.
Healthy LifeStyle Octopus: As important as clinical trials and scientific research are, they remind me of the Britannica-Wikipedia question. What about the millions of notes and comments that exist, albeit undocumented, about how people feel day to day, how they respond to various treatments, and what train of ailments occur under what lifestyle and other environmental conditions? When I went to the doctor with allergy symptoms and came away with a prescription for some antihistamine, the data capture ended with the filled prescription. We are missing lots of useful information about health and health care delivery. So about the octopus. I have been trying to find out whether my image came from Kathleen Norris (The Cloister Walk) or Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). [Both of these are wonderful books.] I couldn't confirm either way, but here is the metaphor from one of them that has stayed with me (though obviously not the attribution) ever since: Life is like putting an octopus to bed. Once you get three or four legs up on one side of the bed, one or two legs have flopped out on the other side, so you run around to the other side and put those on the bed and... you get the idea. A healthy lifestyle is one of the legs on the octopus. All the habits and food choices and other behaviors that lead to recovery from ailments or staying well are part of a bigger context of all the things that make up daily living. If wellness were the only focus of one's life, which can certainly be the case if your life is threatened, then you ignore the other legs and keep on track with the behaviors needed to get better. But most of the time for most people, lots of worries and obligations and of course temptations compete with these legs for attention. Before you know it, work pressure leads to eating that pizza at the lunch meeting (it's free after all). Staying healthy often seems like a dash around the bed to stick a flopped off leg back up there. This approach probably does not optimize good health. Good health seems to be a very individual set of behaviors and choices under specific constraints in environment and resources. Could a really robust web of personal experiences and stories provide a better way to keep the legs on the bed? Or could the intervention of lifestyle coaches who reinforce our focus on health (help us keep the health care legs on the bed) improve outcomes?
Blogging and OPBs: When I was on my walk today, I felt my comments on cancer information were pretty strong. I can't quite bring them off here. And I don't really want to draft and edit until I get the message exactly right. I left a comment on another blog that rejected the idea of blog report cards because I don't want to see the careful language of business and academia polluting the interesting conversations going on. But I posted that message feeling small and petty. Someone posted their thoughts and I wasn't very kind to them. Maybe this comes from living in the south. I had an acquaintance from France who said that folks there could passionately debate any idea with anybody (articulate enough to hold their own), but they have no interest in the personal details of anyone's life; and folks in the US south could endlessly discuss the personal details of people's lives with perfect strangers but won't discuss meaningful ideas with any but their closest friends. I was invited to comment on my issues with Warren Redlich's health care economics blog, but keep putting it off with some kind of silly scrupulousness. Maybe since I am not southern, I can gird my loins and get on with it.