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.
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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!
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10.11.06
Posted in Architecture, Conferences, SOA at 2:02 pm by kkj
Last week was one of those intense ones that are jampacked with impressions, starting out with the annual JAOO conference in Ã…rhus, Denmark.
JAOO 2006 began for me on monday morning with a great keynote by Dr. Werner Vogels, the CTO & VP at Amazon, on “The Amazon.com Technology Platform: Building Blocks for Innovation”. Mr. Vogels started out with a soft introduction to Amazon and its evolution from single business to technology platform. The second half of the talk focused on some of the challenges in running a platform for multiple businesses and this was where things got interesting. With its gradual advancement from soft business talk to solid technical discussion, the talk was a great keynote. A pity, though, that mr. Vogels didn’t have a follow up where he got a chance to dive into the challenges and solutions to designing large scale ASP solutions. I would have been there.
I stayed on the SOA track thru monday and attended Gregor Hohpe and Ivo Totevs presentations. Gregor has a firm grasp of enterprise integration challenges and at a pace of 57.4 words / second manages to convey an awful lot of information in a very short time. He is a great speaker and I got so inspired from the talk on “Patterns in Service-Oriented Architectures” that I ended up buying his book. As for Ivo Totev, I am sorry, but I found the presentation a waste of time: A talk on SOA governance, which adresses the challenges and how to tackle them REGARDLESS of which product (if any) you choose to aid you would have been refreshing. Unfortunately, this talk was anything, but.
Kresten Krab Thorup opening JAOO 2006 on Monday morning
Monday ended with the conference party, which is a must-attend event if you’re there. Lots of good food, good company, and adequate amounts of beverages.
Tuesday I had a few meetings in the morning and arrived at noon for lunch, then attended “Bringing SOA to life: A new Danish Infrastructure” by Mikkel Hippe Brun. The Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation has come up with a model for exchanging webservice messages over SMTP in a secure, reliable fashion that uses the Danish National PKI infrastructure (OCES). A close cousin to the SOSI project, I found this approach quite interesting and I expect we will see some kind of convergence between the two initiatives in the long run.
My last session at this year’s JAOO was Jeff Sutherland’s, “Scrum Tuning: How to Make Good Scrum Implementations Better!”. Jeff is the Scrum guru and the session did presume that you were already implementing Scrum at your company, which was actually fine. In fact, this is the kind of session I would like to see more of at JAOO: the ones that presume you already know this or that issue and have come to discuss solutions and learn from those battle-scarred souls who made it back. On the downside I did find the use of function points somewhat less convincing. I thought serious professionals had long gone and buried that useless beast. Guess not.
JAOO is as much a networking event for me as it is a chance to get up to speed on what’s going on in areas of the industry that don’t have my immediate attention, and it excels at both! I compared OOPSLA to JAOO last year and I stick by my evaluation from back then: With its open sessions and great social acitivities, JAOO is much more my type of conference, and I will be back next year.
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