Need eeen-put!
I'm not very good at being original, but I am able to recognize patterns and take ideas from one field and apply them to another.
I've been thinking about information. I work in healthcare IT, I've watched the evolution of computing. I see the trends in computing slowly creeping into everyday life. I see them creeping into every aspect of healthcare and try to use these patterns to create a competetive advantage for my company.
For a long time, information was stored in brains and books. To get it, you had to find the right person or the right book. Actually, to form new ideas, you usually need to find lots of tid bits stored in many places. Humans and paper books are not very efficient. Humans forget, they are too busy to help. Books are hard to search through.
Nowadays, we have the internet. At first, information was stored in brains, books, and on the net. You still had to find the right person to tell you where to look on the net. Search engines made it so people could poll the internet and get somewhat relevant data back. The efficiency of this process has improved; but it's still lacking. Also, web pages are not very interactive, so communication is predominantly one way.
Online forums make this process slightly easier and interactive. You can poll other humans, who tend to have better comprehension of your query than a search engine. They can also make suggestions that, no offense to Google, work better than Google Suggests. Unfortunately humansy tend to be slow to respond. Chat rooms solve this problem, but people are too busy to sit around in a chatroom all day (most of them anyway). Face to face meetings with people are still very helpful because the medium of speech is much easier and faster for communcation than using our hands to type. If it weren't so, then there would be no point to cell phones; we'd all be texting each other.
The web, discussion forums, chatrooms are a variety of mediums we use now to communicate.
Where am I going with this? Let's take a look at some examples.
When I started at UC Davis, electronic class registration was just beginning. You'd get an appointment time to login and choose your classes, scheduled based on ranking. Then you'd quickly search for classes and choose which ones to sign up for. It was an electronic version of the real life system. It was faster than the real thing because you didn't have to physically run around an auditorium to sign up for the classes on paper roll sheets. But the system didn't really utilize the advantages that computing could confer. At Cal Poly SLO a few years later, users created their own system where students could create a list of classes beforehand and the system would automatically try to sign them up when their appointment time arrived.
Ebay has created an electronic version of auction houses. It is better than an auction house because there are far more goods available in one place than in a physical auction house, but you are still stuck searching around and waiting for auctions to end. The system does make some suggestions to guide you, but it's hard with the existing system to lower your workload. Automatic sniping programs and sites improve the situation by doing the menial bidding for you.
Craigslist created another marketplace. Since its easier to post and to focus on local communities, for many people it is preferrable to eBay. You also don't have to go through the auction song and dance-- but you do have to be fast. Many items are sold as soon as they are posted. I and others have written Craigslist spiders to scan craigslist based on preconfigured searches and notify sellers of our interest faster than any human could. Users of such services have a competetive advantage AND they reduce their workload.
Seeing a pattern?
Microcontroller programming uses two methods to capture data: polling and interrupts. In polling, a controller checks an input device's state until something happens. This is wasteful because cycles are "wasted" waiting for something to happen. With interrupts, hardware allows the main "brain" of the machine to carry on executing logic until something happens. Then the hardware signals the code of the event and it can process it.
It's like the difference between walking outside to see if someone has arrived at your door and having a door bell so people can just ring you when they arrive.
So I propose the following process for "electronification" of data:
1. Representation of traditional systems electronically
2. Addition of features enabled by technology; start with low hanging fruit, continued improvement with diminishing returns
3. Next generation systems: using existing electronic data, reinvent processes to improve efficiency
Want a vision of the future?
Healthcare data is becoming increasingly available in electronic form. It is searchable in very constrained and procedurally awful ways. Data is very isolated in different (disparate) repositories, and in really awful formats. Meaning, it's a total pain in the butt to search it. At my company, we aggregate the data using the lowest common denominator format in healthcare and convert it our own XML based representation for more efficient manipulation.
When you suddenly bring all this data together many doors open up (actually we're totally manpower limited in how creative we can get; there's just too much to do).
We could have just created a product that fits into step 2 of the electronification of data, but we've decided to just leapfrog to a next generation system like step 3. This gives us a competitive advantage since for some reason most companies are sticking to step 2. Probably because its easier, but many of them have more manpower than we do, so I don't quite get it; there is a first mover advantage after all..
Ok, so enough tooting my own horn. How does this apply to your life?
Over time, you will see the quantity and then the quality of available electronic data increase; devices and data stores will be increasingly aggregated (it's only a matter of time until merged GPS/mp3 player/phone/email/browser is predominant; Garmin had better diversify); and increasing complexity will be offloaded onto machines because newer gadgets will be consuming your life and you won't have time for the old ones. Traditional devices will be replaced by newer ones that aggregate functions because they provide a competitive advantage.
Things will get really interesting when I will be able to think and my PC will write it down for me instead of requiring me to beat up my poor wrists by typing at 1am. And who knows, maybe in our lifetimes, we will be able to get an RSS feed update to check out your buddy's latest thoughts (LiveBrain instead of LiveJournal)?
Addendum: thinking about it, probably the reason that most healthcare products fit in step 2 is that healthcare, due to high regulation, tends toward large organization which have plenty of manpower and established systems, so efficiency is not crucial. It's like why we don't have 100mpg cars; because gas is cheap enough and the infrastructure is already there. This is where startups have the potential to start real change, if only they can operationalize the competitive advantages of new technologies.
I've been thinking about information. I work in healthcare IT, I've watched the evolution of computing. I see the trends in computing slowly creeping into everyday life. I see them creeping into every aspect of healthcare and try to use these patterns to create a competetive advantage for my company.
For a long time, information was stored in brains and books. To get it, you had to find the right person or the right book. Actually, to form new ideas, you usually need to find lots of tid bits stored in many places. Humans and paper books are not very efficient. Humans forget, they are too busy to help. Books are hard to search through.
Nowadays, we have the internet. At first, information was stored in brains, books, and on the net. You still had to find the right person to tell you where to look on the net. Search engines made it so people could poll the internet and get somewhat relevant data back. The efficiency of this process has improved; but it's still lacking. Also, web pages are not very interactive, so communication is predominantly one way.
Online forums make this process slightly easier and interactive. You can poll other humans, who tend to have better comprehension of your query than a search engine. They can also make suggestions that, no offense to Google, work better than Google Suggests. Unfortunately humansy tend to be slow to respond. Chat rooms solve this problem, but people are too busy to sit around in a chatroom all day (most of them anyway). Face to face meetings with people are still very helpful because the medium of speech is much easier and faster for communcation than using our hands to type. If it weren't so, then there would be no point to cell phones; we'd all be texting each other.
The web, discussion forums, chatrooms are a variety of mediums we use now to communicate.
Where am I going with this? Let's take a look at some examples.
When I started at UC Davis, electronic class registration was just beginning. You'd get an appointment time to login and choose your classes, scheduled based on ranking. Then you'd quickly search for classes and choose which ones to sign up for. It was an electronic version of the real life system. It was faster than the real thing because you didn't have to physically run around an auditorium to sign up for the classes on paper roll sheets. But the system didn't really utilize the advantages that computing could confer. At Cal Poly SLO a few years later, users created their own system where students could create a list of classes beforehand and the system would automatically try to sign them up when their appointment time arrived.
Ebay has created an electronic version of auction houses. It is better than an auction house because there are far more goods available in one place than in a physical auction house, but you are still stuck searching around and waiting for auctions to end. The system does make some suggestions to guide you, but it's hard with the existing system to lower your workload. Automatic sniping programs and sites improve the situation by doing the menial bidding for you.
Craigslist created another marketplace. Since its easier to post and to focus on local communities, for many people it is preferrable to eBay. You also don't have to go through the auction song and dance-- but you do have to be fast. Many items are sold as soon as they are posted. I and others have written Craigslist spiders to scan craigslist based on preconfigured searches and notify sellers of our interest faster than any human could. Users of such services have a competetive advantage AND they reduce their workload.
Seeing a pattern?
Microcontroller programming uses two methods to capture data: polling and interrupts. In polling, a controller checks an input device's state until something happens. This is wasteful because cycles are "wasted" waiting for something to happen. With interrupts, hardware allows the main "brain" of the machine to carry on executing logic until something happens. Then the hardware signals the code of the event and it can process it.
It's like the difference between walking outside to see if someone has arrived at your door and having a door bell so people can just ring you when they arrive.
So I propose the following process for "electronification" of data:
1. Representation of traditional systems electronically
2. Addition of features enabled by technology; start with low hanging fruit, continued improvement with diminishing returns
3. Next generation systems: using existing electronic data, reinvent processes to improve efficiency
Want a vision of the future?
Healthcare data is becoming increasingly available in electronic form. It is searchable in very constrained and procedurally awful ways. Data is very isolated in different (disparate) repositories, and in really awful formats. Meaning, it's a total pain in the butt to search it. At my company, we aggregate the data using the lowest common denominator format in healthcare and convert it our own XML based representation for more efficient manipulation.
When you suddenly bring all this data together many doors open up (actually we're totally manpower limited in how creative we can get; there's just too much to do).
We could have just created a product that fits into step 2 of the electronification of data, but we've decided to just leapfrog to a next generation system like step 3. This gives us a competitive advantage since for some reason most companies are sticking to step 2. Probably because its easier, but many of them have more manpower than we do, so I don't quite get it; there is a first mover advantage after all..
Ok, so enough tooting my own horn. How does this apply to your life?
Over time, you will see the quantity and then the quality of available electronic data increase; devices and data stores will be increasingly aggregated (it's only a matter of time until merged GPS/mp3 player/phone/email/browser is predominant; Garmin had better diversify); and increasing complexity will be offloaded onto machines because newer gadgets will be consuming your life and you won't have time for the old ones. Traditional devices will be replaced by newer ones that aggregate functions because they provide a competitive advantage.
Things will get really interesting when I will be able to think and my PC will write it down for me instead of requiring me to beat up my poor wrists by typing at 1am. And who knows, maybe in our lifetimes, we will be able to get an RSS feed update to check out your buddy's latest thoughts (LiveBrain instead of LiveJournal)?
Addendum: thinking about it, probably the reason that most healthcare products fit in step 2 is that healthcare, due to high regulation, tends toward large organization which have plenty of manpower and established systems, so efficiency is not crucial. It's like why we don't have 100mpg cars; because gas is cheap enough and the infrastructure is already there. This is where startups have the potential to start real change, if only they can operationalize the competitive advantages of new technologies.