Archive for Presentations
09.06.07
Posted in Presentations, Public Sector at 8:33 pm by kkj
Yesterday saw the convergence of no less than 160 people from all over the Danish Public Sector, at the SAS Hotel, Amager, Copenhagen. The Digital Taskforce of the Ministry of Finance called the event to promote the 1.0 (0.8) launch of a common integration model (OIM) for web based public sector information portals. See the previous post on the topic for details.
The day was packed with presentations that outlined goals and solutions of a strategic, and technical nature as well as backgrounders on how the two portals virk.dk and borger.dk are being designed.
My involvement in the project was on the appendices of the OIM that contain the low level guidelines that service providers need in order to get started on publishing content via portals. I gave a presentation on this topic just after lunch, the time of day which in my experience is about the worst time to present: people are full and dazed, and if there’s no coffee (which there wasn’t), it can be quite a challenge to sow any intellectual seeds.
The solution? I don’t think there’s a universal panacea, but I try to keep a loud voice, have interesting as in “less text, more pictures†slides, and maybe crack a joke or tell a story. That tends to help a little … although, truth be told, at the end I did spot two that had their gaze firmly fixed on the inside of their eyelids.
There were no evaluation sheets, but from the discussions I got the impression that people were positively curious. For instance the dreaded, “why is this relevant at all?†question didn’t show, and instead lots of relevant topics were brought up.
A good day, kudos to the Taskforce. Now let’s see this baby in action!
Permalink
11.28.06
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, Presentations, SOA at 1:54 pm by kkj
This thursday I was invited to speak at a national strategy workshop on medicines data arranged by MedCom with the purpose of discussing the current situation, the vision, and what needs to be done to get there. The last speaker of the day, I presented DGWS from the context of the SOSI project and the challenge, which started it all: to be able to exchange data between EHR medicines modules and the national medicines profile (PEM) at The Danish Medicines Agency.
Rather early in the day, it was agreed that the vision for medication in Danish EHR should be:
- Health care personnel must have easy access to correct and up-to-date information about the current medication for the patients they treat.
- M.D.s must have easy access to complete information about drugs, their usage, and effect.
- Patients must have easy access to correct and up-to-date information about their own medicines and how to administer it.
All slides from the workshop are available from The Danish Medical Association where the conclusion of the workshop is also available (in Danish).
Permalink
10.28.06
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, Presentations, SOA at 1:57 pm by kkj
Wednesday
October 25-26th saw the annual conference on the status of Electronic Health Record (EHR) implementations in Denmark converge on Nyborg Strand Hotel with +500 attendees from regions, governmental units, vendors, and consulting agencies related to the sector. I showed up early to make sure I didn’t miss the keynote by the Danish Minister of Health, Lars Løkke Rasmussen.
In the wake of last year’s conference, the media decided to zoom in on the delays in EHR implementations w/respect to the original masterplan, and the debate became so heated that the Government decided to step in and restructure the effort. The result is that a new national organization is currently being formed with the intent of coordinating, shaping, and setting the direction of EHR, nationwide. The minister promised that the ambitions remain as high as always, but gave no deadline regarding actual EHR implementations.
I sat thru the second session, which had three conference organizers reflect over EHR development 2000-2006, which was OK, but not news. Alas, the session dragged on 15 minutes longer cutting the lunch break shorter and I had to rush a bit to check in, move luggage, network, and more. I was hoping to attend the next session on data access but had to make to a few phone calls and check email, so I ended up skipping not only that but the next one as well. Good thing I made it back at 17:00 for the last session of the day.
It turned out to be hilarious. An M.D, a former Minister of Health, a senior vendor representative, and a CIO were set up in a panel discussion titled “EHR on the other side of the ford” (i.e. once your’re not midstream anymore, but most likely have wet feet). All of the participants turned out to have strong opinions about not only the future, but also about the past. The M.D took the stand that EHR is basically a bad idea and defended this dubious viewpoint violently. Others fired back, resulting in a veritable trench warfare.
IMHO the only reason for introducing IT into the health sector (or any work environment, really) must be to enhance the way business is conducted in this case making individuals more effective, less cumbered by tedious routines, less prone to error, and generally more satisfied with their work. That implementations have failed to achieve these high goals sometimes even resulting in the opposite results does not mean the concept as such is wrong: No serious person would ever demand that flying be banned just because a single, defect airplane crashed and burned …
The day ended with the party that everyone came for 
and as usual it was great fun. Last year I confess to going to bed at 5 in the morning, but this year I had to lay low because of my presentation the day after.
Thursday
By some strange and still inexplicable miracle I made it up at 8 in the morning, got breakfast and actually attended the morning keynote. This was interesting stuff as the chairman of the board for the national EHR organization, Ib Valsborg, would be giving an update on the current state of affairs together with his colleague Lars Hagerup from Danish Regions.
Mr. Valsborg echoed the promises that the Minister of Health gave the morning before, but also said that the new national organzation would need the support and assistance from the regions, and that while some tasks would be centralized, others would remain local. Mr. Hagerup became more specific, saying among other things that integration would likely be the key task along with defining the overall architecture for the sector. The first task of the national group will be to define a new it-strategy.
I salute the decision to introduce national program management for EHR, something which has been sorely missed! We need a central organization that can coordinate efforts, enforce standardization, and ensure that the vision of making patient data available where needed, when needed, can be fulfilled.
Mr. Hagerup also mentioned that current EHR implementations are being evaluated by a consulting agency (Deloitte) and that five experts with extensive experience in the health industry are to ensure the right questions get asked … Silverbullet is proud to be represented as one of them thru my colleague Henrik Ibsen!
I ditched the next talk to go over my slides one last time, and went on at 11:00 in a session titled, “How can different standards work together?” along with Ronnie Ericsson of sundhed.dk, Leif H. Christiansen of Region H, and Kenneth B. Ahrensberg of the Danish Standards Association. I had 20 minutes to present the seemingly ubiquitous good webservice yet again. The challenge this time being that the audience could not be expected to know what SOAP is other than some water-soluble cleaning agent made from late animals. We got quite a good response overall, and I thought the presentation went well.
Mr. Kjelstrøm presenting
I sat in for about 10 minutes of the last session after lunch, which had some fellow from the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies give his 5 cents on the use of information technology in the future health sector. I found the presentation rather boring and left.
Overall the conference was good and I think better than last year. There had been some speculation on wether the formation of a new national EHR organization would mean the demise of conference. Not so: The organizers inivited everyone to Nyborg next year and I for one will be there.
Permalink
10.14.06
Posted in .NET, Architecture, Conferences, Presentations, SOA at 2:01 pm by kkj
Last Thursday the 5th of October just after the JAOO conference my colleague Ivan and I headed to suthern Funen along with some 70 other attendees for the MedCom seminar on web services. A two day event, our task was to give a technical presentation about DGWS and then spend the afternoon going into details about the .NET version of the Seal framework developed at Silverbullet over the past months. Specifically we were to teach the attendees the finer details of the framework thru a series of exercises for 8 hours.
At 11:00 following breakfast and a general introduction, I went on and presented DGWS once more without any issues. At 13:00 we had the excellent Restaurant buffet and at 14:00 everyone was back in the conference room. That’s when we ran into a bit of trouble: Just as he was about to plug in the VGA cable for the projector, Ivan’s ACER laptop decided to have a melt down. It went completely dead: Quote T.S.Eliot, “not with a bang, but a wimper”.
An unplanned pause of about 10 minutes passed in mild panic as we dug out the slides from CDs, copied the whole thing onto my MacBook Pro, fired up Parallels with Windows XP in it and started Microsoft Visual Studio. Finally Ivan was ready to continue and for the remainder of the day he fought bravely with the Mac keyboard trying to get as exotic characters as / and @ to appear. To his credit, despite being traumatised by a dead ACER and a Mac with and odd keyboard, he did a very good job. As we neared the end of the day at 18:00 most of the attendees had finished the first couple of exercises, and more than half were in the second part, a few completely finished. All in all a very satisfactory experience. And none the less for having the Mac save the day
Ivan presenting Seal.NET on my MacBook Pro
At 19:00 most of us went for the conference dinner party and had a terrific evening. One unexpected and very pleasant surprise was the entertainment by Jens Rahbæk Nørgaard who not only turned out to be a satirical entertainer, but a skilled one at that! These conference parties tend to last into the night, and the day after most of us wished the bar had closed before midnight.
The second day contained a series of presentations about the upcoming standards, based on DGWS. I thought this part went well too, but was happy that I had my turn the day before and could concentrate on sipping water! All in all I felt the conference was a great success. Kudos to MedCom!
Permalink
09.09.06
Posted in Architecture, Presentations, SOA at 2:03 pm by kkj
Last week I had a case of slide-show-overload:
Monday found me in a conference room at IBM Århus, giving a technical presentation on the SOSI framework. My part of the seminar focused on presenting the web service profile underlying it all, “Den Gode Webservice” (DGWS). Although feedback was limited (either it was too boring, too hard to understand or just perfect), I felt that it went well.
Wednesday had me caught up in an all-day session on your basic SOAP, WSDL and more tutorial in Odense, and thursday I had the good fortune to give a presentation on DGWS and SOSI again, this time at Danske Regioner’s HQ (Danish Regions) in Copenhagen. This event presented the background for a EU project concerned with building a web based electronic health record, giving suppliers directions and guidelines for the basis of offers. My presentation was slightly off topic, but was there to ensure that SOSI and DGWS would form the basis - in the likely event that web services would be used. It went equally well.
There are currently no plans for SOSI/DGWS events in other parts of the country, but I am sure invitations will come from Bornholm, Greenland and the Faroe Isles any day now.
Stay tuned
Permalink
06.23.06
Posted in Presentations, SOA at 2:06 pm by kkj
Phew!
Since April I’ve literally been buried in work, defining a standard SOAP envelope for the Danish Health Sector with MedCom, while at the same time juggling digital signatures in Java on the SOSI project. Thank the higher powers that part of my job was to make these two projects converge! Today I presented our work at MedCom and we received great, positive feedback that won’t require many changes before 1.0 can be published later this summer.
The standard leverages SOAP, SAML, WS-Security, XML Signature, and WS-Utility in combination with the Danish standards, OIO-XML and OCES to define a profile with the following important features:
- Allows different authentication methods: digital signatures and username/password
- Defines an envelope format with sector specific information for decentralized authorization checks
- Can be used for point-to-point and single-signon scenarios via SAML
As it stands today the standard, coined “Den Gode Webservice” (the good web service), is a super-set of which SOSI is a specific usage, a sub-set. The mission was two-fold: to define a Health Sector specific format for system-system integration, while at the same time allowing the single-signon usage scenario defined by the SOSI project.
Although the standard has yet to prove its worth, today I feel that mission was accomplished.
Permalink
09.13.05
Posted in Architecture, Presentations, SOA at 11:23 pm by kkj
There was a war in the World. There always is. This time the war was between two Semitic tribes, the Ephramites, and the Gileadites. Leading the Gileadites, Jephthah and his men smote the Ephramites and were victorious. Some Ephramites escaped the battle, and the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan, asking everyone who passed, are you an Ephramite? If they said no, the Gileadites replied, then say Shibboleth! Ephramites would say Sibboleth for they could not pronounce it right. The Gileadites took those Epramites and slew them at the passages of Jordan, and at that time 42.000 men were killed. (Interpretation of the Book of Judges, Chapter 12 verses 1-15).
Today I did a presentation of a pilot project within Amtsrådsforeningen, which aims at defining a SOA for the Danish National Healthcare domain. The topic of the conference was security, and so I concentrated on providing a rough outline of the standards and services we see in such a SOA with respect to security. One such standard is the Security Assertion Markup Language v2.0 (SAML), which among other things is based off the Internet2 initiative, Shibboleth from which this article takes its name. A Shibboleth is a way of speaking, which identifies members of a group from non-members. In this case, those who belong to the domain Healthcare from those who don’t.
The pilot project uses the Danish National Digital Signature initiative (OCES) as the basis for providing a single-signon infrastructure with SAML tickets. Once authenticated, a user can gain access to services in the SOA by showing the ticket along with the request for service to some provider. The provider, in turn, can use the ticket to get a profile from the centralized authentication server, which issued the ticket in the first place, and then validate authorization.
The presentation is at a pretty high level, and does not dive into technicalities.
Permalink
05.20.05
Posted in Presentations at 5:15 pm by kkj
Yesterday I had the good fortune to give a presentation on Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) using Aspect/J at TietoEnator, Copenhagen. The target audience was senior developers, and the slides therefore focus on technical aspects of AOP, and Aspect/J syntax. Following the presentation we had a good discussion on when to use AOP and what it probably isn’t great for.
In short, Aspect-Oriented Programming is a discipline, which addresses modeling cross-cutting aspects of object-oriented code in a modular fashion. These are things like logging, profiling, billing, security-checks, exception handling, and the like, which are strewn across packages and traverse inheritance-hierarchies. This is, at least, the general perception of AOP. Where it gets tricky and debatable is when AOP is used for systems development, business logic and the like. Adrian Coyler’s blog on AOP with Aspect/J has a set of interesting entries on this topic.
Sun for one doesn’t like it although JavaOne will host a panel discussion this year on AOP. The teaser says it all:
“Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) technology is receiving a great deal of attention within the object-oriented programming community. Although it provides a great deal of power, it also potentially greatly disrupts program semantics. This session hosts a lively debate between some leading proponents and some leading doubters of AOP.”
The Sun strategy is to provide frameworks, and employ design patterns to model cross-cutting. In J2EE for instance you have Servlet Filters that can intercept calls to URLs matched by some pattern. There is no similar mechanism for EJBs although it would be natural since the application-server already intercepts all calls in its EJB-container and uses similar techniques to provide security, transaction control etc. to bean implementations. Had there been a filter facility for EJBs, and a way to piggy-back context information on RMI calls, I probably wouldn’t have gotten started on AOP in the first place. Take that, Sun ;-).
In my mind, AOP is yet another tool in the architect’s toolbox, highly suitable for certain purposes. I have used AOP with success to hide complexities, avoid annoying frameworks, and enforce coding style. But just as you wouldn’t light a cigarette with a flamethrower, you shouldn’t base enterprise systems entirely off AOP.
In short: Like all the other tools our there, AOP is no magic Silver Bullet.
Permalink
03.17.05
Posted in J2EE, Presentations at 10:05 am by kkj
Java Erfa Gruppen is a group of IT professionals, working with Java and organized under DANSK IT. A couple of weeks back I was invited to give a presentation on a topic of my own choosing. With the Javaworld article How to create an EAR-wide user session in J2EE still fresh off the digital printing press, it was a natural choice.
The talk was supposed to have lasted for one and a half hours, but speedy Kåre finished in forty-five minutes. Guess I forgot to slow down.
Permalink
02.23.05
Posted in Presentations at 12:10 am by kkj
During 2003 I served as technical architect on the Danish National Health Portal (Sundhed.dk), defining the underlying software infrastructure and implementing the certificate-based security model. I got an invitation from The National IT and Telecom Agency to present the security model at a workshop within the OIO standards body.
It was relatively hard to make the presentation because it had been more than a year since I finished coding it. I spent quite some time trying to remember how everything was bolted together, looking over slides and documents provided by Sundhed.dk. It would have been helpful to have the source handy.
I guess it went OK even so.
Permalink
« Previous entries
View Kåre Kjelstrøm's profile
