Gogrid

As much as I like Amazon EC2 the fact that it does not support windows has been a large hindrance to me seeing 50% of my current projects require Windows Server. Hence I have moved to Gogrid.com. So far the impressions are good, it’s stupidly simple to get up and going with a virtualised server. The pricing is reasonable. Will provide more feedback as I use the service more and more.

O2 and customer service

I have had various issues with O2 over the last year or so. The latest being connectivity with my O2 XDA. Unfortunately since O2 are not offering to cover the unit since it is > 12 months since I bought the unit (received another swapout last January when it was just under 12 months) I had to go through their Retail head office who stonewalled me.

 The issue is now with a unit called Customer First in Limerick. Lets see what happens….

Zoho Project

I’m more and more impressed with the Zoho products by the day. Using Zoho project instead of OpenProj.

Health plans ‘not based on evidence’

Just read this in todays Indo. According to the National Director of Cancer Control Professor Tom Keane, planning for health services in Ireland is made difficult because some decisions could be based on “opinion” rather than evidence.  In case you haven’t heard of him he is the person who is in charge of reorganising cancer services into eight specialist centres. Does this mean he is implying that the IT systems in place in Ireland are insufficient?

He also brought up another interesting fact from his work in Canada. During the overhaul of cancer services all existing managers had to resign and reapply for their jobs.. They were either reappointed or deployed elsewhere. Nobody lost their jobs. Shades of lean thinking there.?

WISDOM in the HSE

WISDOM is a system being developed by the HSE (Health Service Executive)/HRB (Health Research Board), according to the HRB “WISDOM is a web-based mental health information system which will capture information on inpatient and community care services in Ireland”. At the moment it is being tested in Donegal.

This system has been in development for some time, as far as I know internally within the HSE and HSB.

According to a HSB newsletter in December 2007 “The HRB is working in collaboration with the HSE and stakeholders to develop an information system to expand the data currently collected from in-patient and community settings. The name of this mental health information system is WISDOM (previously know as NPIRS/COMCAR)”.

 OK, this is all well and good but where is the mention of Evidence Based Healthcare, Outcomes all of which are supposed to be applied across the board to all Health Services Delivery projects.

It also mentions a rather long development lifecycle “..the Board is comprised of clinical personnel, service users, carers, ICT personnel, data protection experts, consumer affairs experts, and HSE management. It will meet each month over the next two years, overseeing the proof-of-concept stage”.

 Two years!! Has nothing been learned from PPARS, etc? And how can a proof of concept take two years? Is nobody following Agile processes? By their nature Public Service IT projects will have considerable refining of the system and it is almost impossible to get everything correct with one major release.

 The main press release detailing the system is located here. I’m not into bashing organisations but if they talk of using best practices across the board then that is what they should do.

 It really does worry me that not once does it mention Evidence/Outcomes in any of the material I have seen related to the WISDOM system. Is this just another case of focusing on process rather than outcomes?

 Also where is HIQA (Health Information and Quality Authority)in all this seeing that two of their core functions are Health Technology Assessment and Health Information.

Accenture on Cloud Computing

At a recent CIO conference the Chief Scientist at Accenture Kishore Swaminathan opined on Cloud Computing. “
However, Swaminathan cautioned that “cloud computing” is not mature enough for CIOs to build a strategy upon just yet. He said: “Issues like security and privacy still have to be addressed” but the cloud is “more secure than companies think”.

He seems to contradict himself here. There can’t be any doubt that hosting your applications and data in the cloud is very often much more secure that storing data on local machines. specially for SME’s which have little or no focus on security.

As for his quote “Cloud computing” is now mature enough for CIOs to “experiment” with. This may be driven somewhat by enlightened self interest in Accentures part(and other consulting firms part) in that they are making alot more revenue from servicing traditional ERP/CRM systems that are very complicated to set up and configure. Originally in their focus on the SME market in recent times they had probably planned to generate revenue using much the same model for SME’s as for Corporates.

Run your business with Zoho

The last few months I’ve been road testing the Zoho applications by using it for my own company’ day to day administration. Originally Zoho was best known for their meeting application software which was a great substitute for WebEx. Over the last year they’ve constantly added new useful apps and at this stage have almost anything that any SME business would need.

One of my personal favourites is Zoho Invoicing which is a quick and very smart way to generate estimates and invoices http://invoice.zoho.com/login/jsp/login.jsp).

Better still it integrates into Zoho CRM. Check out the complete range of tools at www.zoho.com.

I’m happy to recommend this to other companies so if you’re interested in learning more and possibly implementing some of the Zoho tools in your organisation contact me. It may even possible to negotiate a cut price rate for the first few clients

Ext-JS licence to GPL

What a shower!! As Graeme Rocher from G2One puts it, “There have been many poor judged, and ill advised decisions made by software companies over the last few years, but this has got to be up there with the stupidist I’ve seen and I’m not even personally an Ext-JS user.”

Well I am an Ext-JS user and have recently been selling it to a client as part of a solution comprising of open source/commercial artifacts. There are plenty of other great open source Ajax toolkits out there such as YUI and DOJO. Will this indirectly help Adobe Flex adoption as well?

Is Connecting Bits to Atoms Sufficient?

I’m just back from attending what was a very informative and thought provoking day. Well done Pat Doody and everyone else who organised the event. This event is sure to get bigger given the range of subject areas today covered. I will add my own summary of the presentations over the next few days. It was humbling and also extremely exciting to hear world class experts talk about their own particular field.

I was using Twitter during some of the presentations to send reminders for some information I was really interested in (and I had no pen). The jury’s still out for me on using it at conferences. I’m sure Jane Grimson gave me a dirty look while she was speaking. She must have thought I was texting a friend.

Tralee IT and MIT

Read this in the IT business pages. This is very exciting since it combines two areas I am very interested in and some expertise as well. Supply Chain and Data Integration/Systems Operability. 

Fantastic to see collaborations of this calibre taking place in Ireland and not just with Universities either. I would be interesting to see whether there exists knowledge sharing between CIDS (Centre for Innovation in Distributed Systems) and the DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Group) which does great work in Semantic Web Technologies. There is definately potential, Semantic Annocation and Integration of Data is the first thing comes to mind. Especially since DERI seem to have some interesting commercial projects in the pipeline.?