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Apr 11, 2012
If you hear the sound of enthusiastic cheering, it’s coming from Liaison. One of our favorite customers—Paul Stamas—is a finalist for the Technological Advancement Award, one of six SearchCIO-Midmarket.com 2012 IT Leadership Awards to be announced later this month. The Vice President of IT at Mohawk Fine Papers was selected for his innovative cloud strategy, which has resulted in a major return-on-investment for the mid-sized paper manufacturer. Stamas revised his cloud strategy to reap the benefits of cloud computing more quickly and save his company money in the process. Tapping into Liaison’s Cloud Services Brokerage model, Stamas took advantage of our enterprise-class integration platform at a fraction of the purchase cost of comparable on-premises middleware products.
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Apr 09, 2012
I was recently at the at Interconnected Health 2012 conference in Chicago, and amongst the various topics being discussed, the most common theme popping up is the need for more standards to allow PHR, EMR and HIE networks to really take hold. I'm in no position to disagree with this, but I do find it interesting that an industry that uses so many acronyms (many of which represent existing data model and messaging standards) still feels like they don't have standards that are sufficient to solve their data integration challenges. Is it too much of a 'pie in the sky' idea to establish just a few data model and messaging standards that cover nearly all use cases, and expect wide adoption of the standard across the industry? Maybe it is.
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Mar 21, 2012
This is the last of a three part blog series that gives a techno-hug to underappreciated older technologies used in cloud-based data integrations. Last up: legacy systems!
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Mar 01, 2012
I am currently reading a great book about enterprise software entitled ‘How to Succeed in the Enterprise Software Market’ by Craig Le Clair. Even though the book was published back in 2005, many of the core ideas and principles still apply.
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Feb 08, 2012
The other day I was cleaning out a pile of old magazines and came across the October 2004 issue of Wired with the article by Chris Anderson called The Long Tail. Chris published a book in 2006 on the subject, which was followed by a TED talk in 2007, where he takes a concept from statistics to describe the long tail in business. He proposed that in some cases the bulk of a company’s business comes from a long tail approach – low turn over items. Apple iTunes is often given as an example of long tail at its best. ITunes has thousands of songs and generates the bulk of its revenue from one-off sales. Amazon is another example.
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Dec 20, 2011
It’s tough to run most businesses without revenue, and in most cases difficult to run a business without customers. In the HIE world, it’s the same with the exception that they can do without those when they have government funding. But funding eventually runs out and this means that they must generate revenue through “customers” – providers, payers, patients or other third parties like life sciences organizations for secondary use of information. The good news is that HIEs, like traditional businesses, can sustain themselves when they have lots of customers; the bad news is they can’t when they lack customers.
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Oct 27, 2011
Typically for an integration project you start with defining the source and target. A successful project starts off by being able to produce an accurate representation (a model) of your data.
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Oct 25, 2011
I have a cough. I had a cold. That passed. But, as is too often the case, the cough remains. Our child’s pulmonologist once explained that lungs often don’t seem to react quickly to shocks and stress. As I recall the conversation, months after a sickness stress the lungs, the lungs may react, causing symptoms which can last surprisingly long.
In any data integration project, or in the data architecture of an organization, you will find what I will here call eyes, lungs and livers (please forgive the awkwardness of the metaphor). Let me explain what I mean, and then why this line of thought was worth the musing.
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Oct 18, 2011
Not that long ago I listened to Douglas Merrill, Ex-Google CIO, speak about humans and multitasking. Of course in between replying to email and IM messages on my smart phone, as well as checking the stock ticker and sports scores, I missed a lot of what he was saying.
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Sep 22, 2011
It was a serious conversation. Nobody present remembers the topic. Everyone remembers a young person earnestly saying, “It’s just spilled milk between the bridge.” Some offshore data integration stories make me think of spilled milk between the bridge.
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Sep 14, 2011
One of the biggest challenges that companies face when trying to integrate with legacy SAP systems using IDocs, is the IDocs themselves. Even with new technology embracing XML, an IDoc is still an IDoc. There is still a considerable demand to be able to translate EDI to IDoc and IDoc to EDI. Take a look at this fragment of an IDoc. Then think about the process of modeling this data and writing a translation map to either convert this to EDI or vice-versa:
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Sep 06, 2011
Some people like working late. Some people feel their self worth is validated by working long hours and saving the day. Some people are forced to work long and late because the organization fails to preserve important knowledge.
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Aug 23, 2011
As someone who has a lot of experience with developing data translation and integration software and solutions, I have come to be all too familiar with the phrase “The devil is in the details”. The issue is far more complex than one might think when designing an integration solution.
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Aug 22, 2011
Information is power: to both the healthcare recommenders, the providers and the decision-makers, and you the patient. True that we often leave the decisions to our doctors, but it is often only you who understands the entire picture. Towards this end, a huge goal of health informatics is to "increase public capacity to access, analyze and disseminate data and information."
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Aug 17, 2011
After more than a year of research, Gartner recently published “Case Study: Mohawk Fine Papers Uses a CSB to Ease Adoption of Cloud Computing,” authored by Gartner Research Vice President Benoit J. Lheureux. The research examines how Mohawk leveraged Liaison’s data exchange platform (DXP) and managed services to enable end-to-end business process integration of on-premise applications and a diverse range of cloud services.
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Aug 03, 2011
“Programming by debugging” is taking something similar to what you want and adapting it until it becomes what you want. Contivo Analyst 5.0 lets you be guided by data to create maps. It still continues to let you use a more traditional approach — working with a mapping specification, and then testing the map with data. But version 5.0 lets you embed data into the mapping process in new ways, to let you work more efficiently and to use data samples as specification information.
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Jun 17, 2011
Watching the FIFA World Cup has me wondering what it sounds like out on the field and how the players and refs communicate. Body language is fairly universal, and at the end of the game talk doesn’t matter, but I’m certain there must be a need for some on-field translation at some point, and I can’t figure out how it’s done. Brazil plays Ivory Coast, Slovakia plays Paraguay, and the refs could be from just about anywhere. These sorts of matchups must stretch some linguistic limits.
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Jun 08, 2011
If you’re like most people, when you first think of Amsterdam, you think “Red Light” as in the Red Light District where window shopping and coffee shops are aplenty. But the kickoff of Liaison Convergence Europe was all about the “Green Light District” which is “all systems go” for cloud-based applications.
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Nov 15, 2010
In 2010, most of the integration professionals we consult with see their EAI/ESB Software purchases in their rearview mirror. Their software vendor’s upgrade story (code name: BPM) is only moderately compelling, now their real question is “Where does enterprise integration go from here?”
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Sep 02, 2010
When we started providing managed integration services we knew our customers would get value by eliminating this resource-intensive and costly effort from their IT operations. The concept was that valuable time and money could be better spent – somehow. We’ve taken a step back to see whether the vision has played out: what do our customers actually spend their “found time” on? A few themes emerged.
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