deal architect

"Because It's B2B"

I ran into Dana Blankenhorn at the HiMSS conference.  And he remarked how little media there was  at the huge conference.  Then he suggested an answer. Because the event is "B2B".

And it hit me:

a) even in this political year, with health care getting lots of attention, MSM is not at this conference. Though with Eric Schmidt of Google keynoting tomorrow, it should draw a few more journalists. As I have written before, it's not a liberal or conservative bias, MSM just has a bias against B2B and enterprisey stuff.

b) The consumer - you and I - have so little say in the health care technology market. Solutions for hospitals, pharma and insurance companies galore, but few signs of consumerization in the various technologies on display. Of course,  sites like WebMD are making the consumer smarter and Google is pushing its Personal Health Record but they are a rounding error compared to the investment in PACS, CDSS, eMAR and other vertical 4LAs which define the industry today.

More of a consumer focus would draw more MSM I would say both would be healthy for the health technology industry.

The State of Services Procurement

Brian Sommer summarizes what he learned in a recent meeting focused around services procurement. I think he is far too generous about the sophistication in procurement practices around services.

This comment is particularly telling "No consistent definition exists for professional services or consulting. Sourcing executives find it tough to apply a single set of practices that apply to the full breadth of services that companies procure."

Just around IT services (as against legal or architectural services) there are distinct markets around contracting/staff supplementation, systems integration, application management outsourcing (and offshoring), infrastructure outsourcing, and BPO. The players are different (look at the different ways different offshore markets are evolving), the things to look for are vastly different (ITIL and utility models in infrastructure outsourcing versus time tracking around contractors), the price points are widely different. And markets are morphing as everything gets delivered "as a service" - so software, hardware, telecom companies all offer variants of IT services.

No single sourcing process or sourcing technology can handle it all. Or should be expected to handle a services market which totals spend of over $ 500 billion a year.

I know I am being critical of my own clients in saying so, but like I wrote here, I wish more procurement folks would treat IT spend, not just IT services, as very different from MRO or other direct spend, not just try to find homogeneous "solutions" .  Lots of empty calories in the spend.

The good news is there are plenty of disruptive vendors and business practices and tools waiting to be leveraged. But they are often at sub-categories and niches of markets. Tough to discover them if you seek a "single set of practices".

Why IT Asset tracking is lax

During the Dell battery recall in 2006, a number of companies struggled to identify where their laptop assets were. There was puzzlement as to why IT, organized in so many other ways, did not have better asset management with bar codes, RFID tags and other technology available for better inventorying and tracking.

After years of detailed analysis, we now know. This video tells us the real story why there is never a full accounting for so many IT assets -)

Gartner says cut IT budgets now

In a research note this week: " Gartner analysts believe that economic factors in the United States have deteriorated to the point where action is required and are advising U.S. businesses to prepare for cutting IT costs."

But Gartner has no guidance on where to cut.

So here's friendly help on where to look - 85% of most CIO budgets are not in internal IT, but spent on vendors. Here is a list of IT items with the most "empty calories" I had posted a while ago. Still great places to look. And here is another area.

Finally, as you cut out the empty calories, indulge in some "dessert" - innovation projects. Those that can meet the MAGIC filters.

"We didn't start the fire...

It was always burning
Since the world's been turning"

- Billy Joel

A friend points out Google has lit a fire by renaming the Persian Gulf as Arabian Gulf in Google Earth.

A few years ago Microsoft offended Indians with their depiction of Kashmir.

With so many disputed territories around the world may be we should quit using names and just start using GPS coordinates to identify places.

Try 26.88288,51.547852 on Google Maps.

The Healthcare Opportunity and Mess

Former US Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist delivered a keynote at the HiMSS conference talking about the mess in US health care. Republicans are focused on costs and looming Medicare funds crisis, Democrats on individual coverage challenges.

Walking through the huge exposition hall here with almost a thousand technology vendors you see more signs of our inconsistent health care. Rocket science in some areas, laggard in others.

You walk through the GE Healthcare booth and you see all kinds of next-gen diagnostic imaging. You see Cisco's vision for tele-medicine.  You see what electronic medical records (EMR) should be like when you go to the Cerner booth. You see Motion's mobile clinical assistant which can scan bar codes and RFID tags on patients and nurses and prescriptions and communicate via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to minimize errors.You see Vocera's  mobile and voice recognition capabilities to allow for more effective communications in high-intensity medical workplaces.

The you step back and see so many choices in each category. For every GE there is Siemens and Philips.  For every Cerner you have an Epic and a McKesson.  And as someone in the industry said - -and don't forget that "Patel EMR" custom developed and used by maybe 5 facilities. One healthcare CIO told me he had over 2,000 software licenses. You see that EMR adoption is mostly at stage 2 or 3 of a seven stage model developed by HiMSSAnalytics.  You see the babel of tower that a new breed of Health Information Exchanges are trying to rationalize. But doing so at local levels and causing their own consistency issues. You notice excitement about ERP solutions - something the manufacturing sector implemented a decade or two ago. You see basic business analytics.

Forget the political gridlock around health care. We also have technology gridlock.

It struck me that 4 years after President Bush announced his "moonshot" that by 2014 every American should have an electronic personal health record (PHR) to mirror or consolidate what their providers EMRs show, today less than 5 million do. As Google steps in to help, may be it should be Facebook which jumps in. People seem far more willing to share their deep dark secrets with them than they do their health details with employers and insurance companies.

Opportunity or mess? 

More in New Renaissance

On my innovation blog

Search for a hotel room which is X and has Y
Nano-prospecting
Technology at the State Fair
Don't laugh at Borat now!
"The Return of the Vikings"

Compromise in Consumerization of Technology

CIO Magazine lists 9 consumer technologies "CIOs fear"

Smart CIOs I know don't just fear - they provide alternative solutions which balance user convenience with enterprise security

So with USB storage sticks,  instead of fighting their handiness, some of my clients have moved to those that support encryption

Instead of fighting the convenience of web mail services and the large storage they provide, more organizations have moved to web based OWA access to MS Exchange and also move to more generous email size limits. Not quite as generous as Google which offers 5 GB of storage, but much better than in past years.

And they look at other creative consumerization solutions to push their enterprise solution providers to more competitive pricing or more user-convenient services.

Mobile Apps, RIP?

Michael Mace writes an obituary for native apps for mobile devices - too much platform fragmentation, too many restrictive business practices

"But we never figured out how to help developers make money"

He does not mention that even in PC/Mac world we have been moving away from "on-premise" and more into the cloud via SaaS via tools like Zoho.

As we find in SaaS world though, some applications though will continue to stay (or at least be available as a backup) offline. On the mobile device with ever new features we will have applications like Word Card Mobile which uses the camera on my AT&T Tilt then OCRs the details into Contacts. There will be geocaching tools you need for the last mile of GPS tracking. I appreciate having a PDF reader and the Microsoft Office tools on my device to at least read documents.

But overall, he is correct - more applications will be written for the cloud. Let's just pray our telecoms can deliver the mobile bandwidth and uptime.

Another SaaS Advantage

So I was reading fellow EI Tom Foydel's note on NetSuite SEO...

and it occurred to me that SaaS customers are inherently Net savvy and ounce for ounce have a lead over on-premise customers when it comes to the new rocket science of web analytics