I’d like to see you meet your personal, financial, physical, mental and spiritual needs. That is, I’d like you to thrive at work and in your own lives. Are you getting what you want from work? Are you getting what you want from your life?
I received this invitation to the TEDx Macatawa meeting this Friday:
About this talk
To find the path to long life and health, Dan Buettner and team study the world’s “Blue Zones,” communities whose elders live with vim and vigor to record setting age. At TEDxTC he shares 9 common diet and lifestyle habits that keep them spry past age 100.
About Dan Buettner
Buettner, a world-renowned explorer and a writer for National Geographic, travels the world seeking out new Blue Zones (he’s found five, to date) and speaking at seminars and on TV, sharing the habits that lead to long life. He is the founder of Quest Network, and has set three world records for endurance cycling.
I then surfed out to the web site to find this:
The Power 9 are specific lifestyle habits shared by the world’s longest living people. These lessons, discovered during Dan Buettner’s research in the world’s Blue Zones, emphasize making changes to your environment that will influence your habits. It’s much easier to promote good habits through environmental change than it is to force changes to long-standing behavior. Everything we do here at Blue Zones is in some way related to the Power 9 concepts.
The Power 9 breaks down into four domains:
Move Naturally – Gain 4 Years
1. Move (find ways to move mindlessly, make moving unavoidable)
Moving naturally is the idea of making low-intensity, daily physical activity an unavoidable part of your environment.
Right Outlook – Gain 4 Years
2. Plan de Vida (know your purpose in life)
3. Down Shift (work less, slow down, rest, take vacation)
A healthy outlook is an important component of longevity. The Okinawans call it “ikigai”, and Nicoyans call it “plan de vida,” but in both cultures the phrase means “why I wake up in the morning.”
Eat Wisely – Gain 8 Years
4. 80% Rule (stop eating when you’re 80% full)
5. Plant-Power (more veggies, less protein and processed foods)
6. Red Wine (consistency and moderation)
You know it’s true: you are what you eat. We want to explore not only what you eat, but how, when, and with whom.
Connect – Gain 4 Years
7. Belong (create a healthy social network)
8. Beliefs (spiritual or religious participation)
9. Your Tribe (make family a priority)
Belonging to the right group of healthy-minded, supportive people might be the most powerful thing you can do to change your lifestyle for the better.
“Accept the challenges, so that you feel the exhilaration of victory” – General George S. Patton
Some improvements in the “meaningful use” final rule sought by the AMA were accepted, but the Association says many practices still face barriers to adoption.
By Chris Silva, amednews staff. Posted Aug. 2, 2010.
Washington — While the final rule determining what constitutes “meaningful use” of electronic medical records provides some needed leeway for physicians, barriers to EMR adoption and implementation remain for doctors, according to the American Medical Association.
The AMA said in a July 21 statement that it had helped effect some positive changes in the final rule, including a reduction in the total number of measures, from 25 to 20, that physicians have to meet in order to qualify for Medicare and Medicaid EMR bonuses in the first two years.
The minimum thresholds for meeting several measures also were reduced. For example, the requirement that a doctor use an EMR for computerized physician order entry of medication orders decreased. Instead of mandating that more than 80% of patients have at least one drug ordered through CPOE, the threshold will be more than 30% of patients. Thresholds also were reduced for transmitting electronic prescriptions and implementing clinical decision support tools.
EMR bonus program poses tight deadline for physicians
But the AMA says physicians still face several challenges in becoming compliant in time. There is no EMR system on the market now that offers the capabilities needed for physicians to become meaningful users. Federal officials expect such systems to become available this fall, which would give practices only a few months to install and test the technology before the Jan. 1, 2011, start date of the incentive program. Physicians who already have invested in EMRs now must upgrade their systems to meet certification criteria.
In addition, the total number of measures that physicians have to meet is still too high, the AMA says. The final rule divides the initial 25 meaningful use objectives into two categories: a core group of 15 objectives and a “menu set” of 10 objectives, from which they can choose any five to defer in 2011-12.
Also, some of the thresholds for meeting the objectives remain high, the AMA says. For example, one measure requires physicians to maintain an up-to-date problem list of current and active diagnoses for more than 80% of patients. In addition, there is no mechanism for physicians to appeal any decision made during the incentive program.
“The final requirements for the meaningful use of EHRs are an improvement over previous drafts, but challenges still remain that will make it difficult for physicians to meet the requirements — especially physicians in solo and small practices,” said AMA Board of Trustees member and Secretary Steven J. Stack, MD.
During a July 20 hearing, members of the House Ways and Means health subcommittee probed the administration’s progress so far in shaping an EMR incentive program that is user-friendly for physicians and hospitals, yet that also yields a maximum benefit for taxpayers and patients.
Some lawmakers expressed concern that the administration may have gone too far in watering down the requirements in its final rule. But officials said the changes to the final rule were necessary to ensure that doctors and hospitals do not become overwhelmed.
“We wanted to make it possible for a small rural practice to become a meaningful user just as much as a large urban practice,” said David Blumenthal, MD, the national health information technology coordinator. “It is not fair to hold accountable individual physicians who desperately want to become meaningful users.”
Eugene Heslin, MD, a family physician in Saugerties, N.Y., testified that EMRs can be an effective and vital tool for small practices, despite some of the barriers they may face during adoption.
Dr. Heslin explained how paperless records may have saved the life of one of his elderly patients. The patient showed up at an emergency department with shortness of breath and had given paramedics a list of medications that Dr. Heslin determined from his home computer were incorrect — it was actually a list for the patient’s wife. If the patient’s EMR had not been available to him at home, the outcome may have been a lot different, he said.
“Is meeting the criteria going to be easy for physicians and hospitals? Absolutely not,” said Dr. Heslin, who is head physician at Bridge Street Medical Group, a six-physician practice. “But they will help me persuade my colleagues that there is critical mass, it is doable at the community level, and that they need to move now along the same pathway to benefit patients and their community.”
The print version of this content appeared in the Aug. 9 issue of American Medical News.
If you have questions regarding how these new rules and regulations apply to you and your facility, please do not hesitate to contact i3 Business Solutions for answers. Call us at our toll free # 877-721-6400, or send us an email at support@i3bus.com
“Microsoft’s Azure just came out of beta testing a few months ago, but the company has already signed up 10,000 paying customers to run their applications in the company’s Azure cloud, a company executive said.”
We work with an increasing number of physician practices in Michigan, and a few have EMR systems. But most don’t– yet.
This article by a physician challenges EMR vendors to make their software products better before EMR goes mainstream. From Dr. Bill Cast:
“Physicians know that better exists. They have experienced Google, Amazon and e-Bay. Game lovers know that Electronic Arts’ “Tiberium,” now 15 years old, exceeds the capabilities of their professional health care software. They know from Yahoo and MSN the value of configuring a home page suited to delivering niche-information of their own preference. They know from using Word and Word Perfect that they can create precision documents merely by tweaking a template. They know they can use voice commands to make a phone call on their Blackberry. They know that they can find drug information more easily on Google than proprietary software. They suspect that if their EHRs and EMRs had physician-specific home page functionality, that they could drop and drag orders, answer FAQs, dictate letters, and save time with templates with many fewer clicks. Ordering medications should be as safe and uncomplicated as using E*Trade.
Today most EHRs and EMRs are invasive both to workflow and finances. While high cost is a significant barrier to physician adoption, workflow disruption remains the killer deterrent.”
Check out this great article about gloStream written by Rodney Bowen-Wright from Microsoft and posted to Microsoft’s Startup Zone Web site.
Rodney is a director of business development and manages vertical markets and mobility portfolios in Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team:
“Microsoft has the right infrastructure and tools to make this transformation happen quickly. One company at the right place at the right time with the right solution is GloStream.
gloStream provides physicians and healthcare facilities across the U.S. with electronic medical record software and practice management solutions based on the Microsoft Office suite – delivered and supported through a nationwide network of local technology partners.
gloStream applications are secure, easy-to-use and the only solutions on the market embedded with Microsoft Office. With a simple user interface, robust voice recognition technology, and single-click access to all patient data, gloStream products help doctors improve patient care by streamlining workflow and creating efficiencies in office administration.
gloStream’s deep healthcare experience and its utilization of Microsoft technology (and specific use of Microsoft Office) provide doctors and staff with a secure, reliable, scalable, customizable and affordable EMR and PM solutions. gloSuite is easy to learn and use so doctors and staff can limit training time and get up their full patient load in a matter of days, not weeks.”
A wonderful list of some of the most bone-headed things that people have said over the years about technology, and especially information technology: Stupid Things to Say.
Here’s just a sample:
“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” –The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
Jason Hiner makes many astute observations in his “Sanity Check” blog at Tech Republic. Some of his best are wrapped into this excellent April post about how we are beyond the ‘OS wars” that the PC technology world gets so fixated on. And I agree with him 100% when he goes on to say that the Web browser is the standard interface for software applications. Here at i3 Business Solutions, our team is focused on web applications that integratre the best of classic IT systems with the new ecosystem opening oup on the web: Read Jason’s entire post for more perspective:
“It’s possible that a combination of voice and touch could revolutionize the user interface (and thus the OS), or that another major innovation could make it faster and simpler for humans to work with computers, but for now the keyboard and mouse are as efficient as it gets. And, as a result, the computer OS has stagnated.
And, of course, the other thing that’s going on is that the Web browser is finally usurping the OS as the universal platform that was envisioned back in the mid-1990s. Please note that I’m not talking about cloud computing or software-as-a-service (SaaS). While applications and services delivered over the Internet are certainly part of the ascendency of the Web browser, they still have not reached critical mass in the business world and the trend is bigger than that.
What we’re seeing is that many businesses are using the Web browser as the front-end application to access private, back-end systems, from databases to CRM to ERP to payroll to corporate portals. And, why not? Since most users are very familiar and comfortable with Web navigation and Web forms, these corporate systems can tap into that experience to provide applications that have an easier learning curve than Windows-based business apps with their unique menus and interfaces.”
Interesting stuff going on the the web world, and this summer promises a whole new round of innovation from startups to new releases from the big guys Google (see Wave) and Microsoft (see Bing)
The McKinsey report Six ways to make Web 2.0 work excerpt here can help keep things in context. It’s worth clicking through to read the whole thing:
“What distinguishes them from previous technologies is the high degree of participation they require to be effective. Unlike ERP and CRM, where most users either simply process information in the form of reports or use the technology to execute transactions such as issuing payments or entering customer orders, Web 2.0 technologies are interactive and require users to generate new information and content or to edit the work of other participants.”
Well worth reading is this ‘Big Picture’ series of articles from the Economist. An excerpt:
“If these obstacles can be overcome, then the biggest winner will be the patient. In the past medicine has taken a paternalistic stance, with the all-knowing physician dispensing wisdom from on high, but that is becoming increasingly untenable. Digitisation promises to connect doctors not only to everything they need to know about their patients but also to other doctors who have treated similar disorders.
The coming convergence of biology and engineering will be led by information technologies, which in medicine means the digitisation of medical records and the establishment of an intelligent network for sharing those records. That essential reform will enable many other big technological changes to be introduced.”
“Although times are lean, many companies are finding that they can’t afford to postpone IT investments that lead to increased security, efficiencies or revenues. Organizations also are trying to make sure they are prepared for growth when conditions improve, and enhancing their IT infrastructure is part of that process.”
Here are the top 10 tech investment areas identified by CIOs in the survey findings:
For years industry experts have been warning the business community about the harm of overusing spreadsheets. The sentiments recently expressed by Ventana research echo our own experience: too many users are using spreadsheets as an all purpose database/logic/reporting tool instead of simply a reporting or analysis tool:
“…our benchmark research shows spreadsheets are now being seriously misused in ways that severely hamper the productivity and performance of corporations. It’s time you seriously rethink how your organization uses spreadsheets.
“Our research confirms desktop spreadsheets pose serious productivity issues. Half find dealing with spreadsheet problems consumes a noticeable amount of time. Errors are a problem: just under half find major errors in data and formulas in their most important spreadsheets. These errors pose financial and reputational risk because most people only check selected cells. Dealing with errors is time consuming and just over half find the spreadsheets they receive are not as timely as they should be. More than half find resolving spreadsheet errors delays business processes and 42% find out-of-date information in their spreadsheets frequently or all the time. Just over half find rolling up spreadsheets is usually or always time consuming. Yet, users are in denial, since only a handful think spreadsheets pose a productivity issue.”
Who in I.T. hasn’t run into the unwieldy Microsoft Excel workbook that has too many worksheets and too many external links? The problem for many is that these overblown spreadsheets become gospel in their respective departments which in turn causes users to rely on them instead of the central business systems. I cringe when I question a user about a piece of information and they open an ugly spreadsheet for their answer (instead of going to the business application software where the information belongs.)
Users who are overusing spreadsheet tools are probably living dangerously. In these cases, it’s time to move away from the spreadsheet in favor of an application that can do the job right without the associated risks mentioned by Ventana. The application should validate the data (to prevent garbage in, garbage out), prevent duplicate data, apply business rules to the data and report current information. Once the data is stored properly within an application spreadsheet users can still feel free to export the base data to do their analysis and reporting. Further, it should be understood by the user community that the data in these spreadsheets are not the final authority — the business applications are.
In what may be an invigorating trend for US information technology providers, IBM recently announced it plans to open an IBM ’Global Delivery Center’ on the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing. The goal for the center is to modernize legacy applications used by state and local governments, as well as colleges and universities.
In addition, IBM and MSU are planning to expand out to help modernize IT systems at companies based in the U.S. in the healthcare, telecommunication, and other industries.
IBM mainframes and AS/400 systems still have a healthy user base in the government, university and healthcare sectors– and the software applications that run on these platforms are long overdue for an overhaul (not to mention all those greenscreen terminals). Here at i3 Business Solutions, we work with these customers all over Michigan.
Here’s an interesting take on this development from Steve Hamm at BusinessWeek:
“While the Indian outsourcing community is flipping out about the Satyam scandal, IBM, which has a major presence in India, is opening its newest service delivery center in….East Lansing, Michigan. IBM is setting up an unusual sort of delivery center on the campus of Michigan State University. The company plans to hire MSU students and graduates, plus others, to develop software applications and modernize computing systems for government agencies and universities. It plans on hiring 100 people by June and 1,500 eventually. An IBM spokesman said this isn’t a low-cost labor play; it’s about the talent. But I’m betting salaries for software programmers are a lot cheaper in East Lansing than they are in Somers, New York; Boston; or Silicon Valley—where IBM employs a lot of programmers.”
Here’s a good read from Tech Republic. I think they’ve got it right. The future of I.T. looks like:
Infrastructure Management (Reliability)
Solutions & Project Management
End user management.
People, process & technology. That’s the what technology looks like today. More & more i3 Business Solutions is delivering the right solutions integrated to disparate technologies. The ‘Cloud’, hosted & onsite applications are blending into a combination of hybrid business productivity solutions. More & more i3’s skill requirements are moving to people, project & process management.
Gartner researcher Tom Austin believes that the future of IT is much more about people than technology. While he makes a compelling and visionary argument, there are aspects of IT that will remain tied to a keyboard and screen.
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It’s become horribly cliche to talk about the importance of IT-business alignment and the need for IT professionals to become much more business-savvy, but Gartner’s Tom Austin (right) takes it to the next level. He believes that the IT professional of the future will be less of an engineer and more of a social scientist.
What? Yes, you heard that right — the word “social” will become a key part of the IT professional’s job description. It flies in the face of most of the stereotypes about techies and it sounds a little corny, but Austin does draw some interesting conclusions that are worth a look, if only because they are so unconventional.
“The problem with IT today is there are too many engineers and not enough social scientists.”
“Too often, we have measurement and reward systems that are focused on how many transactions did you process, how many orders did you ship, and how many deals did you close — rather than who helped these other people succeed.”
“There’s a recognition that if you relax some controls — not all — you’re probably going to get more creative behavior out of the individuals than if everything is locked down.”
“There are still people in IT who’ll have to worry about keeping the systems running, but now we’re going to think more about how to exploit the things we can do with social networking, expertise location, and all of the other higher-level social ordered phenomenon we can facilitate using technology.”
“It’s not the technology that counts. It’s the people.”
The fact that IT keeps running into these issues about being more business-savvy and people-savvy may simply be a natural part of the evolution of the profession. My TechRepublic colleague Mark Kaelin said that when he was in business school studying accounting, his professors constantly drilled home the fact that too many accountants were just number crunchers and that what the field needed was accountants who were more focused on understanding the business and how they could best serve it. Sound familiar?
In order to evaluate Austin’s arguments, let’s take a look at the three segments that IT is going to be divided into over the next decade:
1.) Operations and infrastructure management
We’re primarily talking about server rooms, data centers, and network operations centers here. IT pros in this realm will manage the backend infrastructure that powers businesses large and small. In the years ahead, this category of IT is going to become highly centralized and highly commoditized. The increase of virtualization and cloud computing will hasten this development.
As a result, managed services companies will grow and take over the data center for many companies. It simply won’t be cost-efficient to have your own data center, in many cases. As such, the administrators and engineers who run these uber-NOCs will be highly trained and highly versatile. They will be the blue collar workers of the IT industry, focused on maintenance and process work.
Although many of these IT pros will need to have strong communications skills because they will deal with multiple customers and multiple accounts on a daily basis, there will also be plenty of IT workers chained to keyboard and monitor and tasked solely for monitoring the infrastructure and keeping it running. Austin’s argument doesn’t hold up very well in this category.
2.) Solutions and project management
Today’s developers and software engineers will morph into this category, which will have a greater focus on delivering end-to-end solutions to businesses, whether in pre-packaged software or custom applications. Just as it happens in many organizations right now, project managers will gather business requirements and build out the plans for solutions that software engineers can deliver.
This is primarily where Austin’s ideas apply. He sees these solutions makers evolving from technology-focused engineers to people-focused scientists and business associates. And, he’s correct that IT needs to build better solutions that are more customer-centric and get the technology out of the way so that users can collaborate and work more effectively.
3.) End user management
From help desk to training to PC provisioning, IT is also responsible for deploying, managing, and supporting the systems that employees use every day. This isn’t going away anytime soon — although some companies have tried to outsource pieces of this — because it almost always involves some form of physical access to the machines. Managed services could take over some of this, but there’s always still a need for at least some physical access.
In the future, the role of this part of the IT department will diminish, although not entirely disappear. Many companies will move toward a self-provisioning model and will support user-owned systems and devices. Plus, the bar for usability and ease-of-use will continue to to be pushed higher and higher.
Nevertheless, even a diminished support department will likely need to change many of its attitudes and policies, as Austin notes, in order to help the company stay competitive. IT will need to relax some of its standards in order to allow more users to easily collaborate and share data and documents.
Bottom line
So, yes, IT is becoming more about people than technology, and IT professionals will need to become more business- and people-savvy. Part of the change is a natural evolution of the profession, and part of it has to do with some of the big technology shifts happening in the back office. Still, there are a lot of IT jobs and roles that won’t be directly affected by these changes, especially in operations and infrastructure. Those jobs will become the blue collar jobs of IT, focused heavily on processes and maintenance, and employed by managed services companies in many cases.
Nick Carr contends that for Amazon, running a cloud computing service is core to its business in a way that it isn’t for, say, IBM, Sun, or HP. In a brief but illuminating video interview with Om Malik, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos underscores this point in describing the origins of Amazon Web Services. “Four years ago is when it started,” he says, “and we had enough complexity inside Amazon that we were finding we were spending too much time on fine-grained coordination between our network engineering groups and our applications programming groups. Basically what we decided to do is build a [set of APIs] between those two layers so that you could just do coarse-grained coordination between those two groups. Amazon is, you know, just a web-scale application.”
“The swift rise of cloud computing—applications made available as on-demand services for enterprises and consumers over the Web—is now requiring HPC and “super” storage at all levels, Platform Computing founder and CEO Songnian Zhou told an audience of several hundred IT managers and developers here at Platform Global Conference, held May 19-21.
Platform Computing makes specialized management software for HPC data centers serving sectors such as the financial market, earth science, oil and gas exploration, health care, and government and military installations.
“Current data centers, most of them built more than 10 years ago, are costly to run and not very efficient in using power resources,” Zhou said. “What IT managers and CIOs need when they are looking to upgrade are agile, scalable, more powerful, more cost-effective servers and storage systems that use more automation, share resources, use less power and run on commodity hardware.
“Yet these new systems must be able to deliver powerful Web services 24/7. This is what HPC brings to the table.”"
Rough Type: Nicholas Carrs Blog: McKinsey surveys the new software landscape
Softwares new battle lines are now becoming visible, report the consultants: “These trends – the growing acceptance of SaaS and SaaS platforms – are likely to create a tremendous battle between the largest software vendors and the newer SaaS providers. While each of these players has an advantage at one end of the spectrum large vendors such as IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft do best in large enterprises, while SaaS “incumbents” such as Salesforce, NetSuite and RightNow are more in favor with small businesses, the real battle is in the mid-market space.
“Accept the challenges, so that you feel the exhilaration of victory” – General George S. Patton
It’s become horribly cliche to talk about the importance of IT-business alignment and the need for IT professionals to become much more business-savvy, but Gartner’s Tom Austin (right) takes it to the next level. He believes that the IT professional of the future will be less of an engineer and more of a social scientist.
