eGovernment

Architecting health

9 years ago
by John Gøtze in

The US Federal health architecture: FCW writes that the Department of Health and Human Services is working on an enterprise architecture plan that would include every federal department dealing with health care issues, in what could become the biggest enterprise architecture plan in the federal government.

“We have a huge data management challenge,” Dr. Claire Broome, senior adviser to the director for integrated health information systems at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

You can say that again. I don’t know much about the US situation in this area, but I guess it indeed is a huge issue everywhere. I’m getting involved in a Danish project about one of the big issues in health architecture: medication. Well, I don’t know the right terminology in this area, but we are starting to look at the architectual issues around everything related to the “life situation” we can call “taking/getting medicin”. This is an incredibly complex area. The prescription based medicin seems to be especially interesting. The doctor – prescription – ordering – packaging – distribution – taking – cycle is the immediate process, but there are related processes which are important too, such as the whole money flow, with transactions worth more than 20 billion dollars a year.

Although it is not the scope of the work I’m currently involved with, the medicine pricing practice seems to be an issue too. Appearently, the pharmaceuticals are a bit too smart with their pricing upgrades. With a well architected medicine system, such tricks would be difficult, if not impossible. At least if the architectural principle openness were used. Maybe we need a CMR, Central Medicine Register, which uniquely identifies and describes all medicine? The problem is not that the data is not digitised, but that it is scattered around in dozens of databases that don’t interoperate well.

It’s a good case for doing some enterprise architecture, but also a challenging one.

Down the dirt road

9 years ago
by John Gøtze in

Enterprise buses and dirt roads. Jon Udell (blog and Infoworld column) picks up on Cape Clear’s Annrai O’Toole‘s memorable characteristic of web service-oriented architecture, “the information bus runs on a dirt road!”. Cape Clear’s hilarious Switch video introduced the dirt road bus a while ago. Now, Udell sees a fleet of buses in the SOA-debates, I’m hearing names such as enterprise service bus, universal Web services information bus, enterprise information bus, and message bus.

The “dirt road” is our protocols, SMTP and HTTP, and how they’re routable, cacheable, and proxy-able in ways that we’ve yet to fully exploit. As Udell writes:

The idea of dirt roads also evokes, for me, Larry Wall’s famous anecdote about the University of California’s approach to designing walkways. At the Irvine campus, according to Larry, planners just sowed grass everywhere and let the paths that emerged define where to put the sidewalks. I wonder about this a lot, lately, when thinking about the differences between LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl|Python|PHP) and .NET/COM or J2EE/EJB. Where’s the inflection point between these two styles? When you harden an architecture for robust transactions, how do you preserve the fluidity that the agile enterprise requires?

Excellent questions. Great metaphors. In my experience, the bus metaphor is not unproblematic. The rumours about a global middleware mafia might be exaggerated, but I get suspicious whenever I hear people talk about the bus as if it was an “omnibus”, an omnipotent bus, i.e., a miracle cure/silver bullet. Although it may be a “polybus”, a polypotent bus, one that, as Darren’s video says, …and it’s like a bus that can go on a lot of different surfaces, like, you know, ice and snow…, but, and that’s what the video doesn’t say, that it might not be appropriate for everything. This is BTW a classic argument in technology policy studies (from Dick Schlove, see my PhD). What I’m trying to say here is that as SOA moves into the mainstream, it’s getting critical to check its limitations. What is it good at? And what is it not good at?

Here I’m not just thinking of the ROI-stuff, which is emerging everywhere these days. My overall impression is that we could really use a good SOA anthropologist or perhaps a WS ethnographer, because we really need to see SOA as a long (cultural) revolution, perhaps especially when we talk about it in government.

Hmm. Robust agility. Why not?

Best Practices en masse

9 years ago
by John Gøtze in

 
The UN-Habitat’s Best Practices & Local Leadership Program, physically based in Nairobi, Kenya, run the great Best Practices Database. Subscribers to Government Technology International get free access.

Going private

9 years ago
by John Gøtze in

FCW: McDonough leaving GSA: Frank McDonough, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Intergovernmental Solutions at the General Services Administration and a leader in the agency’s Trail Boss program, is leaving for a position in the private sector.

I’ve known Frank for a couple of years, and have enjoyed working with him on GOL-IN. Good luck out there, Frank.

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