20-20 Cricket match or Test Cricket

Any day if a cricket fan is asked what would he or she love to watch given a choice between 20-20 and Test match and 90%(I think) would probably say 20-20 . In fact a Test match has started taking the form of 20-20 and finish off in 3 days rather than the whole 5 days. Shehwag has to be blamed for that probably because of irrespective of what form of cricket he is playing he males century at the same speed. Poor guy he is just doing what he is naturally good at. :-)

Given the age and time that we are in why do we think that a customer would wait for 9 months to see a solution implemented. Talk about an MDM Solution and we say that any implementation will take nothing less than 9 months. The customer has every right to say then “Thank You” and move on. The MDM solution ROI has to be shown in lesser time and the complexity has to be hidden. That will be the point where we will be make exceptional growth in markets like India. The Customers in growth market do not have a huge IT department to implement complex solution and neither do they have a window big enough as 9 months to see the ROI.

IBM has taken a step in the right direction by acquiring Initiate into the MDM portfolio and enables customers to implement the simple MDM solution at the same time and realize the ROI earlier. The conceptualization of a virtual MDM to a physical MDM would allow the customer to see the MDM path and end goal much more clearly.

The IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management V10 is the latest release from IBM MDM portfolio. Find all the details about it on the following URL
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/infosphere/mdm/features.html

Hope it it a step in the righ direction to convert some of the MDM Test matches to a 20-20 and customers come flocking towards it. :-)

Learning Initiate

Recently went through an IBM Initiate training, and I was very impressed with the set of tools and documentation of the product. It has a very cool workbench which gives the capability to configure and maintain the product. This tool can handle all the nuisances of the creation of an MDM server solution. Most of the MDM server projects actually do not reach their achieved goal or are failures because the process to achieve Master view itself fails. Typically the steps involve around loading cleansing, analyzing, and reviewing the data.

The Initiate workbench provides capabilities to do all this and more. The most interesting feature that it provides what it says is algorithm configuration which typically allows you to:-
1. Standardize the data to a format which can be entered into the system
2. Bucket the candidates
3. Compare the members

Configuring Algorithm is also pretty cool through a drag and drop UI. With a clear set of use cases it should take probably a day to configure it . Once you have configured all this, then the data is loaded into the system, and there on you start doing the actual MDM functionalities of matching and linking records.

I still need to see the other UI, which is Inspector and their reporting capabilities but till now what I have seen is quite impressive.

Smarter HealthCare Solution

Recently was attending a Conference in Atlanta and one of the panel discussion that I attended was on Smarter Health Care Solution. A very interesting set of panelists from Google, Symantec, Intuit and Microsoft participated in it. Indeed in US it is a hot topic because of the highly expensive healthcare system. The point of discussion was how do we make the healthcare system much smarter and worth the amount that is spent on it by an individual. Everybody agreed in the panel that in order to create a smarter healthcare solution one of the biggest steps was to create an electronic health record. This record can be something that can be shared easily between hospitals and doctors that a patient needs to consult. Considering that one of the studies shows that in 5 years 30% of the world's data would be around health record, it definitely makes more sense.

An electronic health record idea is great but currently there is lack of a standard format to create and share this record. Companies like Symantec and Google have solutions to create electronic healthcare record but each of them have their own standards and they are completely non-interoperable. So for example consider that there are two hospitals that provides and maintain an electronic health record. A patient from the first hospital has to consult a doctor from the second hospital. Can the same electronic record be used in the second hospital? Currently it is not possible. So the solution needs to be standardized and then only it makes sense to do that, otherwise the patient will land up carrying more printed data which are anyway questionable in terms of security.

Once an electronic health record is created the next thing is about the security and integrity of the record. Most of this data is very sensitive and needs to be carefully shared so it is very important to provide access structure around this record. At the same time the integrity and the uniqueness of the data also needs to be maintained as an error in health record can actually cause very severe outcomes. IBM's recent acquisition Initiate provides a high quality data integration solution. Initiate has a very strong matching engine where key criteria for matching is:-

• Bringing together a complete set of information even if the individual is known as J Krishnamurthy in one system and Jay Krishnamurthy in another and so on.
• Also another criteria is avoiding mixing information from two distinct patients
  who live in same city like Rahul Sharma and Raul Sharma.

The next thing after ensuring the correct accurate data is building analytics on top of it so that research and predictions can be done around them. India is becoming a hub of high standard healthcare at very affordable cost. Hospitals are equipped with instruments and doctors who can do the most complicated surgery at reasonable costs. So a smarter healthcare system should definitely be the journey that the companies especially in India should start investing in, so that the there is economic growth and the society also progresses.