Everyone knows how ubiquitous smart phones have become. You can’t walk down any street without seeing the majority of the people – young and old – talking, texting, or in some way connecting with their mobile device. The proliferation of phones and the demand for immediate accessibility will continue to grow, as will demand for connectivity in our daily lives. And given the personal nature of mobile devices, the design and functionality of apps must meet the ever changing and more demanding nature of user expectations even when the users themselves don’t yet know what they are demanding. Mobile apps need to always innovate and always be ‘better’ than the last version. Read further >

For several years I have been involved with Health Level Seven (HL7) in the development of the Infobutton standard. In their simplest form, Infobuttons are context-sensitive links from an electronic health record (EHR) system to a knowledge resource. A knowledge resource is typically a website with information for professionals and/or patients; an example would be UpToDate. Infobuttons are designed to make it easier for healthcare providers to answer clinical questions. For example, an Infobutton might appear next to an abnormal lab result. Clicking on this Infobutton might take the clinician directly to information on what this abnormal result means and what further action (treatment, additional tests) is warranted. Read further >

In this digital environment, most of us recognize that data is a valuable asset. The U.S. government is starting to realize that too. For years, the government has been data-rich, but not information-rich. Sitting on a gold mine of data now, efforts are being made to convert the ever-growing data mountain into actionable intelligence. Read further >

I presented at a Leading Edge Alliance conference in Prague today for the Internal Technology Special Interest Group. The discussion was hot and heavy on whether firms should relinquish applications to a cloud environment. Many issues were raised from security to connectivity. IT partners and managers are faced with the dilemma of how to handle this paradigm shift from housing applications internally where they are responsible as a technician, to where they are responsible for strategy and direction rather than keeping the system up and running. Read further >

Do you know that feeling when you have to get to a website and suddenly you realize that your browser no longer remembers your password? Or you are on somebody else’s computer? Or on your mobile device? I bet you do… I guess if you are an average Internet user, you have something between 50 and 100 places that you visit infrequently enough to forget your login/password but still frequently enough to care about it. So, what can be done about it? Read further >

In a meeting I attended last week it struck me how informally we often speak about certain concepts that are key in defining state-of-the-art knowledge products. In this case the discussion was about the importance of a comprehensive approach to classifying our tax, legal and regulatory content, and about what kind of classification system to use: taxonomy, thesaurus or other. Read further >

There is a fundamental assumption that underlies popular support for consumer sovereignty and other forms of autonomy in decision making (e.g. marriage choice), namely, the assumption that people are able to make choices in their own best interests. Is that supported by scientific evidence? It seems no. And what about our customers? What is driving their choices? Read further >

Civil law jurisdictions and common law jurisdictions have differences. But just how different are they? Supposedly legal reasoning in civil law jurisdictions applies deductive, rather than inductive, reasoning in the process of resolving legal disputes. There is a presupposition that the starting point of study in all civil law jurisdictions is legislation or a Civil Code and that the starting point in common law jurisdictions is cases. But the differences between the two systems in terms of lawyers’ research behavior are diminishing. Read further >

In my last post, I wrote about an “Anytime, Anywhere, Anyhow” strategy for software architecture. This time, I’ll explore one of the trends that make that strategy possible. Read further >

Software is a strange product when you think of it. Because of its immaterial nature the manufacturer of the software usually sells a license, a right to use the software. On top of the usage right the buyer pays a support and maintenance fee. The latter will in theory insure that problems discovered in the software are fixed (via a patch) and when a new version of the software is released the buyer has the right to upgrade to this new version and benefit from new features. The software vendor owns the program code and won’t allow you or others to make changes to this code and enhance the functionality. Read further >