Ms. Kirchberger claims such proactive apps are rare and implies those that do exist are largely outside the legal field (e.g., apps for monitoring medical conditions, productivity, or GPS navigation). In the field of tax and accounting, however, this would not be an entirely new concept and would be referred to as “compliance.”

The trend in providing more compliance content has been around for quite some time but it is obvious that the focus has recently shifted to the issue where and when that content is delivered to the user. A whole collection of terminology and concepts has accompanied this shift in focus. For example, when integrating content into a process or workflow, someone might refer to delivering content at the “point-of-need.” If approached from an information retrieval perspective someone might talk about incorporating “context” to narrow what content is retrieved — a point recently made by Christian Dirschl in his post on The Future of Retrieval Engines.

Regardless of the terminology used, the goal seems to be the same — delivering compliance content to users at the relevant time not relying on the user to locate the content. Despite Ms. Kirchberger’s assertions that such products are rare, there are products that put these concepts into practice today. For example, Intelliforms is a software product that helps tax preparers find, organize, and complete tax forms. When filling out these forms, the product links users to compliance materials relevant to the specific form field the user is completing.

Even if there is a lot of overlap in the terminology used, having a variety of ways to approach these issues and think about the solutions is valuable. Ms. Kirchberger’s comparison to apps outside of law for example, raises the issues that may not be obvious when discussing point-of-need or context, including the possibilities of delivery directly to non-professional consumers. However, the most important possibility raised by Ms. Kirchberger’s post also happens to be where I think the compliance trend will focus next. After tackling when and where to deliver content, the focus will likely shift toward further customizing the content and its delivery by incorporating personal and other data, which opens up numerous possibilities with its own set of terminology.

This is just one example of an innovative company that is slowly becoming obsolete by new technology. Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics predicts that even the DVD will be gone in six years. Other products and industries that are expected to sunset, at least in their present forms, are:

• Wrist watches
• Paperback books
• Instruction manuals
• Greeting cards
• Car keys
• Tollbooth agents
• Maps

Credit cards, checkbooks, retail coupons and even cash are also going out of style. Groupon purchases have replaced traditional coupon clipping. Bills can be paid with PayPal, direct-debit from your bank account, or providing the numbers off of your check over the phone. Consumers can take a photo of a check using a cell phone in some instances! Click here to see a short video on Erik Qualman’s book.

What does this mean for the accounting practice? The client of the future prefers to communicate digitally wherever possible. They will be working from their mobile device such as a cell phone or tablet and sending their financial information via a secure web connection such as a portal where they will collaborate with their financial advisor.

The accountant of the future wants to be connected to the information they want whenever they want. They will be scanning documents upfront and keeping track of everything in a document management system tracked via a web based workflow system. All of this lends itself to utilizing cloud technology.

In fact, the accountant of the future will be more involved in analytics rather than compliance. The data of the client will be captured at source directly from credit cards, bank information and other sources via the cloud. Click here to see the future of screen technology.

The current Health Level Seven (HL7) “Infobutton” standard (technically known as the Context-Aware Knowledge Retrieval standard) features a relatively simple model. Requests contain a main search criterion, such as a disease, a drug or a lab test, as well as a set of optional context information. The context information may include:

• Patient context (e.g. age, gender)
• Provider/user context (e.g. physician, nurse, pharmacist)
• System context (e.g. order entry, lab results review)
• Encounter context (e.g. outpatient, inpatient)
• Information recipient context (e.g. provider level information, patient level information)

For example, an Infobutton request may be asking for provider level information on the outpatient treatment of hypertension in a 54 year old female. The request specifically excludes data elements that could identify the patient, such as the patient’s name, date of birth, email address or phone number.

At the recent HL7 working group meeting, there was some discussion about expanding the scope of the Infobutton model to include certain information that could identify the patient. One of the use cases presented dealt with the ability for the user to send information to the patient. Specifically, the user, let’s say a physician, would start in the EHR, click on an Infobutton to a knowledge resource, locate a patient information document and then email the document to the patient. In order for the knowledge resource to be able to email the document to the patient, the EHR would have to have sent the patient’s email address to the knowledge resource in the original Infobutton request.

This issue prompted a lively discussion at the meeting. One of the points that was made was that the email address in this use case would be there to facilitate delivery of the information, but it wouldn’t add to the description of the context of the information request. Even if information elements related to delivery of the information were added to the model, they should be in their own class(es) and clearly separated from the classes that describe the context. The Infobutton implementation guide could then make it clear that those who implement the delivery class(es) must do so in accordance with patient privacy laws in their jurisdiction.

Others pointed out that the successful adoption of the Infobutton standard may be largely attributable to its simplicity, and in particular, to the fact that patient privacy isn’t an issue with the current model. If the model were expanded to include patient-identifying information, even in “specially marked” classes, Infobutton adoption could suffer. As soon as these classes became part of the model, implementers could no longer assume that patient-identifying information would be absent from Infobutton requests, so they would have to take steps to ensure compliance with patient privacy laws. These steps might include legal, technical and administrative measures that might very well stop some healthcare organizations from implementing Infobuttons.

This discussion will be continued on some upcoming HL7 conference calls, so stay tuned to this blog for further updates. In the meantime, feel free to post your own thoughts on this question using the comments box below.

As has been well documented, especially in the past year, there is a growing recognition that we require novel tools and approaches to handling big data. As noted by David Weinberger in his book, Too Big To Know, the role of knowledge and information has changed with the advent of the Internet and the scale of information we’re dealing with.

Concurrently, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need our software, systems, and computers to be able to communicate with one another meaningfully – at a semantic level. It’s no longer adequate to create a silo of information, rather, data is being generated in a decentralized fashion by multiple, distinct actors. There is value in sifting through and aggregating all this. Indeed, 2011 was a breakout year, bringing ontology to the mainstream with Apple’s introduction of Siri. As Steve Hamby notes here, 2012 looks to be the year of the Semantic Web.

Lastly, in many cases people are not waiting for the top down models to catch up, but are actively engaging with the plethora of information and tools at their disposal. Mashups - web applications that combine data and functionality from two or more services have been undergoing rapid growth, innovation, and iteration over the past few years and allow citizens and users to create datasets and online environments that resonate directly with an experience or story. As Christine McLaren observes here:

From people’s kisses in Toronto, to the concentration of pizza joints in New York, to the number of women who ride bikes, to the likelihood of being killed by a car in any given American city, the list of lenses through which we can now view our cities and neighborhoods goes on, thanks to data-mapping geeks.

What’s been missing so far is true semantic integration of the various back-end services and data sets.

Organizations with a wealth of experience in combining large volumes of data from multiple sources (such as Wolters Kluwer) are uniquely positioned to take advantage of all these opportunities. This should be an exciting year.

Dominator

Now this is not the opening to my upcoming Sci-Fi drama but rather an imminent reality. At the end of 2011 there were 82 million connected TVs in homes worldwide according to research group Informa. By 2016 it forecasts that number will have ballooned to 892 million. I also predict Smart TV’s will be into corporate offices quicker than you can spell: iPad. At Wolters Kluwer’s HQ in Alphen a/d Rijn, Netherlands, you are greeted by the latest news displayed on a large screen in the lobby. These are scatter around the building and in board rooms. Fact is, the TV screen still dominates and it will continue to do so by convergence with the web.

Domesticated

Actually, my first web-like experience coming to Europe was ‘surfing’ TeleText pages on my TV. I still use it occasionally for looking up flight status from my comfortable couch at home. And it’s not just flight status lookups but also legal research that is being domesticated. While doing year stats analysis on research portals, I discovered that engagement peaks during weekends with hours instead of minutes spent on site. Imagine you could utilize the biggest screen (TV) in your home for research. It’s the same argument why you would use your smallest screen (Smartphone) for quick lookups.

Dipping toes

Natural interfaces such as touch on Apple’s mobile devices or motion on Microsoft Kinect are slowly replacing mouse and keyboard. I wouldn’t go as far as using my eyes to control the screen but I think it isn’t farfetched that a minority report style of interface will enter our television sets. And some in legal technology have already been wondering when it will appear for legal research. Traditional print publishers are already dipping their toes on Apple TV, Google TV or Roku.

In the end, the trick is not looking objectively at what’s happening now but intuitively at what will happen. More after the break…

• seamlessly connect a patient to all of their lifetime medical records;
• improve the quality of healthcare received;
• lower costs;
• facilitate information sharing.

Privacy advocates fear that medical data and information, which is already bought and collected without patient approval, would become an even greater commodity. They also fear that patients would be less honest with physicians, due to fear of diagnosis or items remaining in their medical records for “life”.

Other countries have identification numbers, much like the United State’s current Social Security Numbers that are used in a variety of contexts including health care purposes. In New Zealand all citizens are issued a National Health Identifier number at birth, it is used to track records and can alert health care providers that use a medical warning system to unique risks for individual patients. In 2010 it was announced that investments were being made to update the system to improve information security and how information was shared into a newly coined “Health Identity Programme” that promises reduced costs and greater efficiency. In the European Economic Area and Switzerland a “European Health Insurance Card” is issued to all residents and is presented upon receipt of health care and contains an identification number.

While privacy concerns are certainly legitimate, I believe a larger privacy issue looms with UPIs and electronic health records in general, and that is the security of the system the records and information is maintained in. With UPIs is is feasible that security breaches would have larger implications due to the vast amount of connected information regarding any one individual. It remains to be seen whether or not the United States will adopt UPIs or continue to rely on current systems and over-use of Social Security Numbers, but it is worth keeping an eye on as electronic health record systems grow.

Let’s have a look at contemporary, modern retrieval engines. They present a very solid and proven technology, they can handle a high volume of (textual) data and there are ways to solve the challenge around change both from the angle of data (new data comes in very quickly) as well as from the angle of the user (different users want different things and one user also evolves over time).

If you google retrieval engines, there are sites which promote “semantic retrieval engines” or “image and video retrieval engines”. And as you probably know, Wolfram Alpha is regarded as a “knowledge engine”.

All this is going in the direction of semantics and context from a search perspective, which is in my opinion absolutely correct and necessary. These roles will certainly have their share in the market in the coming years. But there is an additional dimension, which I rarely see reflected in the discussions on the web: context from a software perspective!

One major aspect where an information provider like Wolters Kluwer brings value to its customers is by delivering the information to the point-of-need, which is very often accomplished through software applications for professionals. The information needed could be existing textual content that we have been publishing for decades. But the user should not have to search for it, he or she would only need a snippet which includes the information and hints where to find similar stuff or more detailed things, etc.

The question now is how to create an intelligent interface between the information and the software application, which takes into account all the context information coming from the software and also knows everything about the content that contains the answers. So the software itself is asking the retrieval automatically on a more or less permanent basis for hints that help the user in his current situation. And these hints and answers are displayed as context information within the professional workflow the user is currently executing.

I am pretty sure that for building a solution that really works, we could highly benefit from the strengths of modern retrieval engines described above. Still the gap is huge.

But where are the alternatives? Creating all the distinct answers from scratch and include them hard coded in the software application? Inventing a completely new intelligent interface? Simply give up and not support the customer adequately?

Let’s have a closer look at what we already have: technology and domain expertise. There we will find the answer.

John Gornick, Master Plumber

I’d like to share some of my Dad’s words of wisdom and guidelines he has used in his life that have made a huge impact on me in my professional career:

Measure twice, cut once. That last extra check before moving forward (or pushing the send key!) has saved me more times than I’d like to admit, and I’m so grateful every time I’ve remembered to do it.

Draw out your plans in detail, so you can better plan your projects and accurately estimate your time and resources. My Dad is a classic example of someone who has operated in his trade knowing that “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” He’s a visual guy and I’m amazed at the quality and detail of the schematics he draws out on paper before tackling a job, like re-piping a house – and how spot-on he is in estimating time and materials required to complete a project. (The picture below is the schematic he drew before installing the boiler in my house.)

John Gornick's Boiler Installation Schematic

If you use the right tool, the job is much easier. There’s a reason there are a dozens of different kinds of pipe wrenches, tube cutters, and faucet stem and cartridge pullers. Regardless of what industry, profession or trade you’re in, if you attack a task or a problem equipped with the right tool, you’ll save lots of time and effort and avoid extra headaches and frustration.

Give it your best effort, every time. If you’re going fall short, don’t let it be because you didn’t give it your best shot. We all make mistakes and miss the mark sometimes, but if you put forth your best effort each time, you can sleep well at night.

My Dad has an amazing work ethic. He’s like the Superman of plumbers. I can’t tell you how many times when he has helped me with projects around my home that he has absolutely worn me out. I have had to request that we take a break, sometimes after working 5-6 hours straight. If I didn’t ask for a break, he’d just keep going – even now at almost 80 years old!

Share what you have and what you know with others. My Dad is the most generous person I know. Even though he raised six children on a plumber’s income, he always gave to charities and shared his time, talents and knowledge with others – and still does today! He’s a great teacher, because he loves what he does and he loves to help others and share with others what he knows.

Study and work hard in school and don’t stop learning, so you don’t have to work as hard as I have had to in my life. Even though my Dad didn’t go to college and struggled at times in school, he has always been very curious about a lot of different things and has committed himself to continuous learning throughout his life – and he always encouraged us to focus on our studies. My Dad has constantly re-educated himself. His regular reading includes Discover Magazine, National Geographic and Popular Mechanics – and his interests range from history and space exploration to music and machinery. Whether on a construction site and talking to the electricians to understand how or why they performed a task a certain way, buying himself a computer and mastering how to use a sophisticated music writing software package in his 60s, or watching the television show, “How It’s Made”, my Dad has had an instinctive drive to broaden his knowledge base. The biggest payoff is the sharp mind he has today at almost 80 years old.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Geez, if I heard this one once, I heard it a million times! How true and how important… but how hard it can be at times to bite your tongue!

If you say you’re going to do something, then do it. Credibility comes from following through on your commitments. Everyone knows they can count on my Dad. He’s not just willing to help others, but he follows through and does what he says he’s going to do.

Be humble and don’t “toot your own horn”. My Dad is humble and self-effacing. (I think I saw his picture in the dictionary next to the word “humility”!) One of my sisters - Christine, a manager with Nokia Siemens Networks, recently reflected on our Dad and how his accolades and acknowledgements over the years came his way because of what he has done – not because he bragged about them. In fact, he has been very much the opposite his whole life, being his own harshest critic and pushing himself to improve and learn new things.

Don’t concern yourself about what someone else has or what they got. Chris also reminded me about a story from years ago, when my Dad and one of his apprentices learned that their boss got a sizable year-end bonus – as a result of the great work that my Dad and the apprentice had done all year long. My Dad and the apprentice either got no bonus or a very small one that year. When the apprentice started ranting about this injustice, my Dad asked him, “Did you get paid what you agreed to get paid?” to which the apprentice reluctantly replied, “Yes”. So my Dad told him, “Then, stop your complaining!” Life is not always fair – and remembering that truth can be great medicine for reducing your blood pressure.

Bonus sayings. Some of the more colorful sayings my Dad uses all the time include: “Your sh*t is my bread and butter” (perfect for a plumber, eh?), “Sh*t always flows down downhill” (I’m sure we’ve all heard about or experienced a boss passing the buck down on a subordinate when trouble hit), and “It’s good enough for the girls we date.”  

In regards to the last saying, one of my brothers - Nick, a Project Manager for Motorola, says there is an expression used by project managers in their work with engineers. The PM has to know when to proverbially “shoot the engineer” – i.e., you need to know when something is really “good enough” and at the stage where more effort on a particular item is of no real benefit. Great advice for balancing time, quality and cost! (NOTE TO MY WIFE AND MY MOM – Don’t worry, it’s just a funny saying, not related to you at all. You are both the best!)

Joe Gornick sitting in front of his Dad, John Gornick

CONCLUSION: I hope some of these lessons that I’ve learned from a master plumber can be of some benefit to you in the work you do and how you approach life.

I’d love to hear some lessons you learned from your Dad (or Mom) that have made a difference in your professional life. Please feel free to share!

Some best practices from the professional world
Recently several tax, legal, and regulatory web-based research products across Wolters Kluwer have added auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches to the delight of customers. For example, today a customer of Wolters Kluwer Spain’s La Ley Digital can log into the system, and begin typing the letter “c.” The system immediately proposes two documents, the Spanish Constitution and a Spanish law, as well as a long list of search terms that start with the letter “c”. La Ley’s auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches thus can help a customer go directly from entering one or two letters and get specifically to a document. Now La Ley Digital is a research product for lawyers. Unlike Google, which serves literally the world, La Ley Digital’s auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches suggest entries that are relevant only to legal practitioners. La Ley goes a step further than Google by automatically adding semantically-related synonyms so that any expansion of the pre-search suggested searches are expanded in a way that matches the user’s intent. That’s how I wish my iPhone search would work, by the way. Another impressive feature of La Ley’s implementation is that even after you select the first search term, La Ley performs auto-complete and generates additional pre-search suggested searches based on the term selected in the prior operation. It goes on and on until there are no more terms for the system to suggest or the user decides that the terms best representing his or her intent have been found. I simply must say “congratulations” to the team at Wolters Kluwer Spain in achieving what I must call the “right way” to implement auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches.

Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting’s IntelliConnect also recently released auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches. An interesting aspect about IntelliConnect is that it offers specialized content for specific tax, legal, and regulatory domains, such as tax, securities, labor, etc., depending on what the customer has purchased. If I type “con” IntelliConnect will suggest both “concentration risk capital component” that sounds like it comes from the securities world, and “Connecticut Cigarette Tax,” clearly a word from the tax and accounting perspective. So no matter what I subscribe to in IntelliConnect, I can experience auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches in a way that is relevant to my areas of practice.

What do you think?
Auto-complete and pres-search suggested searches raise some interesting questions and I am curious about the opinion of others:

1. Should a suggested search term based on auto-complete or pres-search suggested searches ever lead to a zero-results search? Does the existence of a recommended term also suggest that there is a document to match it? Should the universe of suggested search be limited according to the content that has actually been selected?
2. Should customers have the ability to add their own auto-complete and pre-search suggested search entries when they do not appear in the list? If yes, should it be possible for all other users of the system to have access to that customer’s suggestion?
3. Is there is a way for us to personalize the universe of auto-complete entries and pre-search suggested searches according to the practice areas that are relevant to customers? For example, if I am an IntelliConnect customer and I am interested only in securities content, even though I can access any practice area on IntelliConnect, should there be a way for me to exclude from auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches anything not related to securities?

I am proud that IntelliConnect, La Ley Digital, and Wolters Kluwer Belgium’s Jura all offer auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches to help end users get more productivity out of these research products. You will see this feature appearing in many more products. Do you have any thoughts about the questions noted above? Do you have any thoughts to share based on your use of auto-complete and pre-search suggested searches? I would like to hear them.

Big data is generally understood to mean data sets whose size are beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. The data is too big, moves too fast, or doesn’t fit the confines of typical database architectures. It requires exceptional technologies to efficiently process large quantities of data. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set.

Examples of big data include: input from chatter from social networks, web server logs, traffic flow sensors, satellite imagery, Internet search indexing, broadcast audio streams, military surveillance, weather and space data, banking transactions, medical records, MP3s of rock music, the content of web pages, scans of government documents, photography archives, GPS trails, telemetry from automobiles, financial market data, geophysical data from energy companies, prescription drug testing, the list goes on. Look at your own organization – it maintains a mountain of data in all of its datacenters, regional offices and on all of its user-facing systems (desktops, laptops and handheld devices).

How big is ‘Big?’
To understand how much data is now at our fingertips, you need to start with “bits” (remember them?), then move along the spectrum to “yottabytes” (which sounds like Yoda, the Jedi master in Star Wars, who wisely said “Size matters not.”)

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/15557421

To put this into context, consider that Wal-Mart handles more than 1 million customer transactions every hour which it in turn imports into databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes, which is the equivalent of 167 times the books in the Library of Congress. Facebook handles 40 billion photos from its user base. Decoding the human genome originally took 10 years to process when it can now be achieved in one week.
McKinsey found that in 2010, people around the world collectively stored more than 6 exabytes of new data on devices like PCs and notebook computers; each exabyte contains more than 4,000 times the information stored in the Library of Congress. Cisco predicts that the amount of traffic flowing over the internet will reach 667 exabytes annually by 2013. Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created and 90% of the data in the world today was created within the past two years. Throughout 2012, those data sets and others can be expected to grow exponentially. The amount of data being generated globally increases by 40 percent a year, according to the McKinsey.

The Data-Rich Landscape
Big Data has emerged because we are living in a society which makes increasing use of data intensive technologies. According to The Economist, there are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide and there are between 1 billion and 2 billion people accessing the internet. Basically, there are more people interacting with data or information than ever before.

The world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster, ever more rapidly. McKinsey believes that the transformative power of big data will amount to a fifth wave in the technology revolution, building on the first four: the mainframe era; the PC era; the Internet and Web 1.0 era; and, most recently, the mobile and Web 2.0 era.

The biggest challenge of the Yottabyte Age will be figuring out how to make sense of it all. As technologies emerge to help harness the volume of these massive data sets, more will be unveiled. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand these astronomical amounts of information – or big data – will no doubt change science, medicine, business, and technology, and virtually every aspect of our lives.