Well-done quality improvement is not punitive; it’s educational: Dr. Brent James, NYTimes 8Nov2009

Seems doctors may have some meaningful insights to share with IT executives and project managers, regarding effective management of a quality improvement initiative. A fascinating NYTimes article by David Leonhardt explains how Dr. Brent James is standardizing certain healthcare procedures, thereby significantly improving certain types of patient outcomes. Even straightforward checklists seem to help a lot. Leonhardt also provides the successful example of

"...the Pronovost checklist. As many as 28,000 people in this country die each year from infections that come from intravenous lines. Several years ago, Peter Pronovost, a Johns Hopkins physician, developed a simple list of five steps that intensive-care doctors should take before inserting an IV line, in order to prevent the introduction of bacteria. The checklist reduced the infection rate to essentially zero at 108 hospitals in Michigan where it was adopted. Pronovost published the results in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2006. But most intensive-care doctors are still not using the checklist. To insert an IV line, they continue to rely on their own judgment."

Also helpful and relevant for IT in my experience, is the statement by Dr. James that

"quality improvement is a process, not an event. In part it works by finding variation and drawing attention to it... And well-done quality improvement is not punitive; it’s educational."

Full article:
If Health Care Is Going to Change, Dr. Brent James's Ideas Will Change It - NYTimes.com

3 Reasons a CIO Should Care About Twitter — CIOUpdate.com

Senior IT executives / CIO's can also benefit from Twitter, according to CIOUpdate.com . The relevant observations excerpted below are a nice complement to my recent post Re: Should Project Managers Twitter? . So here are some of the potential business benefits of Twitter which (when balanced against the known Twitter security/privacy issues) can make sense for many organizations:

3 Reasons a CIO Should Care About Twitter — CIOUpdate.com: "...If all the buzz in the mass media isn’t enough to get you interested in Twitter, here are three solid business reasons why CIOs should devote some time to learning more:

1. Get Targeted Insights Faster - ... Some of the smartest people I meet haven’t devoted themselves to publishing or publicity that gets them a high Google ranking. But they are willing to share their experience and make themselves available for legitimate conversations.
Enter Twitter. Anyone can post their 140-character question, idea or comment on any topic. While the stream is uncensored and unfiltered, it is highly searchable. And because responses come in real time, it’s a channel that is particularly suited for time-sensitive information.

2. Participate in Social Media Innovation - ... the availability of Twitter’s API may present a direct opportunity for you and your company’s brand and products. Is there a way to utilize Twitter to support customer service (see @ComcastCares), promotions, order tracking, etc?

3. Expand Your Professional Network: ... as Twitter participation stabilizes will a valuable professional community emerge? There are some early signs that a viable CIO community exists on Twitter. At this point, I’ve identified over 70 CIOs across 20 industries. You can keep tabs on the growing community at http://www.ciodashboard.com/cio-twitter-dashboard . ..."

Google Earth Goes to the Moon - Celebrating July 20th, 1969

I doubt anyone could have foreseen this cool mashup 40 years ago...

But then again, I doubt anyone could have foreseen the amazing success of the first "Man On the Moon" back in 1929, either :)



Google Earth Goes to the Moon - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com: "On the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic walk on the moon, Google is offering Internet users a virtual trip to the moon. On Monday, the company unveiled Moon in Google Earth, which allows anyone to embark on Moon versions of the kinds of 3-D flyovers that Google Earth users are familiar with. Like the flyovers of our planet in Google Earth, the moon visits are enhanced with all sorts of content, including narrated tours, photos and videos.

“This tool will make it easier for millions of people to learn about space, our moon and some of the most significant and dazzling discoveries humanity has accomplished together,” Anousheh Ansari, a trustee of the X Prize Foundation and the first female “space tourist,” wrote on a Google Blog. “Moon in Google Earth enables you to explore lunar imagery as well as informational content about the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts, narrated tours and much more.”

The blog post includes a video with some of the highlights of Moon in Google Earth. A more detailed blog post goes further into some of the details. Google Earth already allows people to explore the galaxy and Mars...."

Hat Tip: http://twitter.com/nytimesbits/status/2743460153

Project Portfolio Management in action: US temporarily halts 45 IT projects (budgeted @$200 million)

As per Demian Entrekin's excellent blog on http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/ppmtoday , the US National CIO Vivek Kundra has embarked on an impressive and BIG IT project portfolio management and reporting initiative ( accessible via http://www.usaspending.gov/ ).

Today (Friday July 17th), a formal announcement on the related blog http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/blog confirms that 45 major federal IT projects are actually being temporarily halted. So the major USA federal PPM initiative is not merely a reporting tool, it is actually being used for taking meaningful and consistent action when project overruns are detected:

"Friday, July 17, 2009

Evidence-based decisionsVivek Kundra, Federal CIO

Today, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), under the leadership of Secretary Shinseki and VA CIO Roger Baker, announced that it will temporarily halt 45 IT projects which are either behind schedule or over budget and work to determine whether these programs should be continued. We’re not talking about a trivial sum here—the Fiscal Year 2009 combined budget for the 45 projects is approximately $200 million. The worst offender of the bunch was 110% over budget and 17 months behind schedule.

We were able to catch these contracts, in part, thanks to our new tool, the "IT Dashboard” which helped shed light on the performance of projects across the federal government.

During the next few weeks, the VA will audit these 45 projects to determine whether additional resources or new management teams can get them back on schedule.

If they can’t be fixed, the projects will be canceled.If you are just hearing about the IT Dashboard for the first time, it allows you to see which IT projects are working and on-schedule (and which are not), offer alternative approaches, and provide direct feedback to the chief information officers at federal agencies.

Given the size and complexity of the federal IT portfolio, the challenges we face are substantial and persistent. The dashboard is not a substitute for good management. Its value comes from leaders who use the information to make tough, evidence-based decisions on the future of IT investments.

The VA’s announcement is part of a broader effort by the Administration to make the federal government more transparent and to boost accountability and drive better performance. From IT accountability to personnel and contracting reforms, the administration is committed to providing better value, efficiency, and effectiveness for taxpayers’ dollars."

Hat tip: http://twitter.com/nytimesbits/statuses/2690095160

Secure Enterprise Twitter-like microblogging from Socialtext - Webware.com 14-July-2009

I recently discussed whether project managers should use twitter.

With the new Socialtext corporate appliance that runs a Twitter-like app behind the firewall, business use of Twitter (or a similar type of "microblogging" capability) now appears to be a simpler issue. This solution seems especially relevant for large organizations wishing to enhance their internal communication, messaging and overall knowledge management. Nice to see that the issue of backup / DRP is apparently being addressed as well:

Socialtext offers enterprise microblogging in a box | Web Crawler - CNET News: "As a follow-up to its free, 50-user microblogging product, Socialtext is launching a new paid service for large to enterprise-sized companies that lets them run the Twitter-like service behind the firewall, and with many more users.

Companies that want it can pay $1 per user, per month, alongside a monthly fee that pays for Socialtext's server appliance. This hardware runs the microblogging software locally, and can be connected to a company's backup systems for if something goes wrong, although it makes nightly backups of its own. The appliance fee also covers monthly software updates that will fix bugs and add new features...."

The doctor in your pocket & Health in the palm of your hand

Neil Seeman is the director and primary investigator of the Health Strategy Innovation Cell, based at Massey College at the University of Toronto. He has recently authored two excellent articles in the National Post, which IMHO suggest some very important uses of mobile technology in relatively simple ways, than can achieve quite meaningful healthcare improvements around the world:

• Health in the palm of your hand , which is a follow-up to his earlier
• The doctor in your pocket

Just 1 excellent examples among the many mentioned:

"Last summer, the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service started a protocol to transmit electrocardiogram readings of their patients to cardiologists' mobile phones. The approach--Winnipeg EMS is part of the Strategic Reperfusion Early After Myocardial Infarction, or "STREAM" study -- allows doctors to work closely with paramedics through life-saving decisions as patients are transported by ambulance. It is reportedly lowering mortality rates and speeding up treatment times."

You can read more great ideas from Seeman and his colleagues (and share your own!) on the new myhealthinnovation.com website, designed for those who wish to "share, vote, and say thanks for low-cost, low-tech health ideas".

“If a computer can figure it all out, we can get lazy”

A cool application, connecting learning, nature, and mobile computing:

Full Article:

Novelties - Foliage Field Guides for Cellphones - NYTimes.com:





'The traditional way to identify an unfamiliar tree is to pull out a field guide and search its pages for a matching description. One day people may pull out a smartphone instead, photographing a leaf from the mystery tree and then having the phone search for matching images in a database.
A team of researchers financed by the National Science Foundation has created just such a device — a hand-held electronic field guide that identifies tree species based on the shape of their leaves, said Peter N. Belhumeur, a professor of computer science at Columbia and a member of the team.
The field guide, now in prototype for iPhones and other portable devices, has been tested at three sites in the northeastern United States, including Plummers Island in Maryland and Central Park in New York, said W. John Kress, a research botanist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, who is also on the research team. The computer program compares the leaf snapshot to a library of leaf images.
“We believe there is enough information in a single leaf to identify a species,” he said. “Our brains can’t remember all of these characteristics, but the computer can.” '

With a nicely written conclusion:

"...Matthew Brown, supervisor of the soil, water and ecology lab at the Central Park Conservancy, thinks that ID programs can be useful. “If people are walking through the park and they come upon a tree that’s not in their field guide,” he said, “they can snap a photo, send it in, and get the name back and find out more information.”
But he believes in traditional education, too. “People don’t have to take botany for four years, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the value of learning information. If a computer can figure it all out, we can get lazy.”

Implementing Business Process Management: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

A nice common-sense summary of 5 factors, one or more of which "almost always" causes "failure to achieve results after attempting to implement a business process management (BPM) initiative":

Implementing Business Process Management: Five Not-So-Easy Pieces

My favorite (and the factor which I have noticed most often is the true culprit when these types of process improvement initiatives fail), is the last of the 5 items:

"5. Either shortchanging, or entirely skipping, the all-important task of documenting and analyzing the AS-IS process before designing the TO-BE process. I touched upon this in Reason No. 1, but it deserves its own bullet, because most enterprises have never fully documented their current processes. Typically, many things are done on a daily basis simply because that’s the way they’ve always been done. But without capturing and understanding the “why” for each of these, you are flying blind in determining what your future processes should look like. And take due caution regarding your new path: Often, as we fix one problem, we create another. Even if you’re clear on where you want to go, you need to know where you are to determine the best route."

dria.org » Firefox-3 AwesomeBar is awesome

Nice explanation and great example of one of the main improvements in Firefox 3 vs. previous ff2, the not-modestly-named-but-quite-impressive "AwesomeBar":

dria.org » Blog Archive » AwesomeBar is awesome: "In Firefox 3, however, the staid and plain URL bar has been transformed into a much, much more powerful and useful tool. Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency).

Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.

Here are some screenshots illustrating the magic. I tend to look up a lot of recipes on the internet, and the other day I wanted to find the recipe for a spicy ginger carrot cake I’d seen somewhere in my surfing. Here’s how the new AwesomeBar makes this unbelievably simple:

I start by typing “ginger”, and AwesomeBar searches through my history and bookmarks to return everything that matches that keyword, showing the first six and letting me scroll through the rest. You’ll notice here that several of the results are bookmarked (blue star icon on the right), and tagged (tag icon). The sites’ favicons are displayed on the left, making it really easy to scan through the results if you know what site you’re looking for in particular:

Instead of scanning and scrolling, however, I just add another keyword, “carrot”. AwesomeBar updates the list to show only the three results that match both these keywords:

Adding one more keyword, “cake”, narrows the list to just a single option:

Et voila. Out of thousands of entries in my bookmarks and history, AwesomeBar has found the single “ginger carrot cake” recipe I had read somewhere online in the past year. I had no idea which site it was on, so wouldn’t have been able to search by the site’s domain. Even Google wouldn’t have helped me here since this recipe doesn’t appear until the 8th page of results when searching for “ginger carrot cake”. AwesomeBar searches only my personal, local bookmarks and history, making it an incredibly powerful tool for finding pages that I’ve visited before and want to find again.

I’ve been using the Firefox 3 nightly releases for some time now, and I can honestly say that the new AwesomeBar behaviour has absolutely changed how I use the Web. Not having to remember URLs or resort to global web searches to find pages I’ve visited before has made using the Web a whole lot easier and more efficient..."

Flowgram: Like a screencast, but with live pages | Webware

As per the nice posting below from the webware.com site, flowgram is a new web-based tool for collaboration. Seems from the online demo at www.flowgram.com that this is a powerful way to share information more naturally and more flexibly than in Microsoft Powerpoint. Lots of potential, at first glance.... Although a flowgram apparently does not yet have the same built-in versioning/revision-history that comes with Google Docs "Presentations", it certainly has plenty of bells and whistles that neither Google nor Microsoft have. However, as explained further down in the article excerpted below (and as seems often true of many cutting edge web-based apps in their initial stages), the business model and monetization are not yet finalized. Best of luck, flowgram!...

Flowgram: Like a screencast, but with live pages | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET: "Flowgram is cool tool for anyone trying to lead others through a thicket of web pages and ideas. With it, you chain together pages, photos, Microsoft Office documents, RSS feeds and custom pages, overlay each link in the chain with your own voiceover and annotation, then put the flowgram out on the the net: on your site, at YouTube, wherever you want people to find it...."