Chuck's Blog

Better Information Management, Better Healthcare Delivery

One of my recent posts ("Cloud, Big Data and Healthcare") was a bit more popular than I expected.  

More than a few people contacted me to share that one of the most important (and interesting) areas in healthcare delivery was around the building and exploitation of VNAs -- vendor neutral archives. 

Their case was simple: through the widespread adoption of VNAs, we'll have ultimately better metadata to analyze, and hence an expedited pathway to big data analytics making a meaningful impact on how healthcare is delivered. 

In some sense, it's about finding logical "gravity wells" where useful metadata can be gathered, coalesced and made productive.  

And large image repositories in clinical settings seems to be a leading candidate. 

Considering Clouds And Public Policy

If you're like me, you probably understand that cloud concepts represent a transformational way of doing IT.

Which brings up a thorny question -- what role, if any, should public policy play in maximizing the value and minimizing the harm?  

That is the exact question addressed very successfully by the CLOUD2 report, a compelling piece of work from a broad representation of industry and government stakeholders, co-chaired by Michael Capellas of VCE.

While I'm not generally a fan of comprehensive public policy reports, this one perhaps deserves some of your attention.

First, it provides a case study on the ideal role of government when faced with transformational technology shifts, such as cloud.  Second, the recommendations (while specific to the government's role) can largely be translated to the private sector, especially for organizations operating at global scale.

And, finally, the recommendations largely transcend technology and vendor bias -- no small feat in itself.

The Vendor Beating

We've all seen parents berate their children, and managers berate their employees.  

It's not pleasant to watch, but it happens.  

As an employee of a large IT vendor, I've been at the receiving end of a reasonable number of vendor beatings. 

Occasionally it's richly deserved.  But, sometimes, it's masking a deeper set of issues that have very little to do any vendor whatsoever.

Such was the case a while back when I offered to do a meet-and-greet for a customer coming in to EMC's Executive Briefing Center.

Learning To Compete -- The Real Challenge Of ITaaS

Competition is the engine that drives us all forward.  

At an individual level, we compete with others who might be able to do a better job, or do things for a lower cost.  At a corporate level, our companies compete each and every day for customers.

Organizations within companies have learned to compete as well.  If you deliver a service to the business, there are always external competitors who'd like to show your internal customers a better, faster, cheaper way to get things done.

I believe the necessity to compete for internal customers is the primary engine behind IT-as-a-service concepts.  

Fail to successfully compete, and your internal customers will likely go outside to get what they need.

In this post, I'd like to share with the the most cogent explanation I've seen on this topic to date: what's happening, what it means to IT organizations everywhere, and -- most importantly -- what you can do about it.

Cloud, Big Data … and Healthcare

Healthcare is a fascinating industry. 

From the drug companies and the insurance companies to the hospitals and clinics -- it's an enormously complex and fast-moving value chain that has a single goal: to help each and every one of us live better and longer lives.

If one were to ask the question "in what industry do you see the fastest adoption of cloud and big data", the answer -- at least for me -- would be healthcare.

A Big Effort To Support Big Data

Industry opinions around the topic of big data analytics range from wild-eyed enthusiasm to hardened cynicism.  

My personal take?  

The cynics should move on and find something better to grumble about; there's absolutely stunning potential being driven by a perfect storm of exploding data sources, nose-diving infrastructure costs and new toolsets to make data dance and sing in ways we haven't seriously considered before.

As of late, one of these toolsets -- Hadoop -- has enjoyed more than its fair share of attention. 

One of its primary strengths is supporting efficient batch processing of enormous unstructured data sets.

Yes, you read that right -- batch processing is sexy again :)

The core technologies are thankfully open sourced, with the Apache Hadoop project being the primary core of the effort.  And yesterday, EMC and Greenplum announced a massive donation to the cause.

2011 EMC EMEA Analyst Summit Recap

As part of my nature, I'm always seeking out different and unique perspectives.  No one really likes business travel, but one of its frequent rewards is the opportunity to interact with people who bring something different to the party.

Such was the case with this week's EMEA Industry Analyst Summit.  We were able to assemble 32 very bright, very engaged and very opinionated analysts for a day-and-a-half session in a nice venue. 

If you were following me on Twitter (@chuckhollis or #EMCsummit) you probably got a sense of what was going on in the room.

For those of us who work and live in the United States, the dreaded trap of "US-centricity" is something to be avoided at all costs. 

And there's no better cure than spending some quality time with people who aren't prey to that malady :)

Housekeeping Note

I was informed a while back that my blog feeds weren't propagating to various RSS readers.  I think most of my September posts were affected.  Travel and other obligations sort of made me put off dealing with what was broken underneath. 

It's not like I have an IT staff to go figure that stuff out :) 

You have to understand that I spend almost all my blogging effort on trying to create interesting content, and almost no effort whatsoever on the blogging platform, statistics, syndication, search optimization and so forth.

Well, I had an hour to myself, and decided to dive in and diagnose the problem.

Way back when, I told TypePad (my blogging platform) to publish full articles to Google's Feedburner, which ostensibly feeds the majority of RSS readers out there.  After a bit of digging around in a Feedburner account that I had set up over five years ago (!), I was enlightened as to what my problem might be.

My posts were too big -- both individually, and in aggregate.  In a world of short, pithy commentary, that felt a bit - well -- embarassing.

However, I was able to correct the problem, and salvage a bit of self-respect in the process.  I told TypePad to just publish short excerpts to RSS, and -- voila! -- the problem appears to be cured.  During the process, I discovered I have a *lot* more readers than appears on the traditional blog hit counter. That was a pleasant surprise ...

Regardless, I apologize for the RSS flood that might be appearing in your readers right now. 

I'll endeavor to keep myself more concise, and to the point :)

Bigger Isn't Always Better

During most of my career in IT, I have tended to hold the larger IT shops in a certain awe: their large and diverse organizations, their ability to field large IT projects, and -- especially from a vendor perspective -- their unquestionable spending power.

I sometimes wondered how the more modest-sized IT shops could ever keep up with the big guys?

No longer.  When it comes to IT transformation -- changing how IT operates to look more like an internal service provider vs. a traditional technology-and-project shop -- the smaller IT teams appear to be winning the race.  They're getting their sooner and delivering results far faster than the behemoths.

And now it looks like many of the bigger IT shops may end up paying a painful price for their size and complexity.

New Security Thinking For A New World

As an armchair student of the big transitions that happen in the IT industry, I've learned that the hard part is getting your mind wrapped around a relatively new perspective.  We, as technologists, tend to focus on how things work, rather than what they might mean. 

For example, the internet isn't really about packets and DNS so much; it's about what can happen when connectivity becomes ubiquitous.   Tablets and smartphones are really about when consumption becomes ubiquitous as well.

Cloud isn't about sterile NIST definitions, it's what happens when IT organizations realize they're no longer a monopoly and have to compete for the business.  

Big data isn't a capacity problem; it's really about learning a new form of creating value from massive amounts of information. 

Get the right perspective on a specific transition, the rest becomes mostly a matter of evangelism  and execution.  Fail to get the right perspective, and you won't make much progress at all.

And so I enjoyed reading the recent findings of the RSA-sponsored Advanced Threat Summit.