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

Gartner's 6/09 Magic Quadrant for IT Project & Portfolio Management

Source: Gartner (June 2009) .

Gartner have recently updated their "Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management".


As Gartner explains, "Project and portfolio management (PPM) applications can provide visibility into the current state of organizational initiatives, resources, and spending through the centralized collection of data from multiple sources and perspectives. Integration across multiple business and IT process domains through PPM system functions provides multidimensional views of this data for better visibility and understanding of resource supply versus project (and other work) demand in IT and other project environments.."

There seems to be some healthy competition among a group of strong leaders, visionaries, and challengers (including SAP, Innotas, and BMC), as detailed in this Gartner report. A related May, 2009 Gartner report (which unlike the aforementioned Magic Quadrant is not available to browse online for free) at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=986223 , entitled "Market Share: Project and Portfolio Management Software, Worldwide, 2008", summarizes as follows: "After a banner year in 2007 with 24% growth, the worldwide project and portfolio management software market growth slowed to 7.4% in 2008 for a total of $1.2 billion. Among PPM vendors, Primavera, Microsoft, CA, Oracle and Agresso hold the largest market share."

As per my recent post regarding the US Federal CIO office, it is nice to see that PPM and related tools can be used in the real world with significant impact - e.g. to decide which projects should be permitted to proceed, vs. which should be halted in case they are significantly overrunning costs without yielding expected business benefits.

However, it is probably worth noting that even the best PPM tools do not add any meaningful value, unless the key business stakeholders contribute to its success by keeping relevant information and metrics up to date. Which is just another way of saying that even though the expected value / ROI may be large for a PPM undertaking, one should consider the full investment / TCO required: Not just the hard costs for licensing the software and related deployment requirements, but the full organizational commitment, training, and change required to make effective use of the PPM system and methodology.

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".

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."

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...."

software? hardware? TRAINING! "Securing the Laptop: Mission Impossible?" eWeek 11/07

Some relevant vendor products listed here, to help prevent data and/or hardware loss or theft:

Securing the Laptop: Mission Impossible?: Page 2: "...make the USB drive itself the trusted device. RedCannon's KeyPoint Alchemy, for example, encrypts USB devices and implements policy management rules for their use. Similarly, VMware's ACE 2 implements a virtual PC, with security policies, on a USB drive. 'The USB drive is a manageable asset,' Gartner's Girard said. 'It will cost you some money, but you can do it.' The epidemic of laptop thefts has spurred other, more novel approaches. Absolute Software's Computrace LoJack for Laptops works much the same as the LoJack automobile anti-theft device. When a stolen system is connected to the Internet, it sends out a signal that enables it to be traced. The signaling works even if the hard drive is removed and installed in another system..."

However, the huge grain of salt is that "user education and training is a not-to-be-neglected component of any laptop security program.
A recent study by the Computing Technology Industry Association found that only 42 percent of companies had either completed or planned a mobile computing user security education program. Perhaps that reticence has something to do with the difficulty of implementing an effective program.
'How do you communicate to businesspeople in a manner they can understand and relate to?' said Eric Litt, chief information security officer at General Motors. 'That's the skill. It may be more art than science. You have to build credibility.'"

NOTE: A somewhat old but still IMHO highly relevant resource from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, including suggested topics for security awareness training:

Building an Information Technology Security Awareness and Training Program

The 10 most important things to teach your users, from TechRepublic

The 10 most important things to teach your users, from TechRepublic:

"...One way to head off at least some of the problems is to educate your users about certain key computing basics. Veteran tech Becky Roberts built a list of 10 things she feels are most critical for users to know, such as how to:

* Provide useful information when reporting a computer problem

* Safeguard equipment and data when traveling or working offsite

* Exercise care and discretion in sending e-mails
..."