Wednesday, March 04, 2015

The Open Group San Diego Panel Explores Synergy Among Major Frameworks in Enterprise Architecture

Transcript of a live panel discussion at last month's The Open Group San Diego 2015.

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect presentation and panel discussion from The Open Group San Diego 2015, which ran Feb. 2 through Feb. 5. Download a copy of the transcript.

The following discussion, which examines the synergy among the major enterprise architecture frameworks, consists of moderator Allen Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Open Group; Iver Band, an Enterprise Architect at Cambia Health Solutions; Dr. Beryl Bellman, Academic Director, FEAC Institute; John Zachman, Chairman and CEO of Zachman International, and originator of the Zachman Framework; and Chris Forde, General Manager, Asia and Pacific Region and Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, The Open Group. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excepts:

Iver Band: As an enterprise architect at Cambia Health Solutions, I have been working with the ArchiMate Language for over four years now, both working with and on it in the ArchiMate Forum. As soon as I discovered it in late 2010, I could immediately see, as an enterprise architect, how it filled an important gap.

Band
What is the ArchiMate Language? Well, it's a language we use for building understanding across disciplines in an organization and communicating and managing change.  It’s a graphical notation with formal semantics. It’s a language.

It’s a framework that describes and relates the business, application, and technology layers of an enterprise, and it has extensions for modelling motivation, which includes business strategy, external factors affecting the organization, requirements for putting them altogether and for showing them from different stakeholder perspectives.

You can show conflicting stakeholder perspectives, and even politics. I've used it to model organizational politics that were preventing a project from going forward.

It has a rich set of techniques in its viewpoint mechanism for visualizing and analyzing what’s going on in your enterprise. Those viewpoints are tailored to different stakeholders.  And, of course, ArchiMate, like TOGAF, is an open standard managed by The Open Group.

Taste of Archimate

This is just a taste of ArchiMate for people who haven’t seen it before. This is actually excerpted from the presentation my colleague Chris McCurdy and I are doing at this conference on Guiding Agile Solution Delivery with the ArchiMate Language.

Zachman
What this shows is the Business and Application Layers of ArchiMate. It shows a business process at the top. Each process is represented by a symbol. It shows a data model of business objects, then, at the next layer, in yellow.

Below that, it shows a data model actually realized by the application, the actual data that’s being processed.

Below that, it shows an application collaboration, a set of applications working together, that reads and writes that data and realizes the business data model that our business processes use.

All in all, it presents a vision of an integrated project management toolset for a particular SDLC that uses the phases that you see across the top.

We are going to dissect this model, how you would build it, and how you would develop it in an agile environment in our presentation tomorrow.

I have done some analysis of The Zachman Framework, comparing it to the ArchiMate Language. What’s really clear is that ArchiMate supports enterprise architecture with The Zachman Framework. You see a rendering of The Zachman Framework and then you see a rendering of the components of the ArchiMate Language. You see the Business Layer, the Application Layer, the Technology Layer, its ability to express information, behavior, and structure, and then the Motivation and Implementation and Migration extensions.

So how does it support it? Well, there are two key things here. The first is that ArchiMate models answer the questions that are posed by The Zachman Framework columns.

For what: for Inventory. We are basically talking about what is in the organization. There are Business and Data Objects, Products, Contracts, Value, and Meaning.

For how: for process. We can model Business Processes and Functions. We can model Flow and Triggering Relationships between them.

Where: for the Distribution of our assets. We can model Locations, we can model Devices, and we can model Networks, depending on how you define Location within a network or within a geography.

For who: We can model Responsibility, with Business Actors, Collaborations, and Roles.

When: for Timing. We have Business Events, Plateaus of System Evolution, relatively stable systems states, and we have Triggering Relationships.

Why: We have a rich Motivation extension, Stakeholders, Drivers, Assessments, Principles, Goals, Requirements, etc., and we show how those different components influence and realize each other.

Zachman perspectives

Finally, ArchiMate models express The Zachman Row Perspectives. For the contextual or boundary perspective, where Scope Lists are required, we can make catalogs of ArchiMate Concepts. ArchiMate has broad tool support, and in a repository-based tool, while ArchiMate is a graphical language, you can very easily take list of concepts, as I do regularly, and put them in catalog or metrics form. So it’s easy to come up with those Scope Lists.

Bellman
Secondly, for the Conceptual area, the Business Model, we have a rich set of Business Layer Viewpoints. Like the top of the -- that focus on the top of the diagram that I showed you; Business Processes, Actors, Collaborations, Interfaces, Business Services that are brought to market.

Then at the Logical Layer we have System. We have a rich set of Application Layer Viewpoints and Viewpoints that show how Applications use Infrastructure.

For Physical, we have an Infrastructure Layer, which can be used to model any type of Infrastructure: Hosting, Network, Storage, Virtualization, Distribution, and Failover. All those types of things can be modeled.

And for Configuration and Instantiation, the Application and Technology Layer Viewpoints are available, particularly more detailed ones, but are also important is the Mappings to standard design languages such as BPMN, UML and ERD. Those are straightforward for experienced modelers. We also have a white paper on using the ArchiMate language with UML. Thank you.

Dr. Beryl Bellman: I have been doing enterprise architecture for quite a long time, for what you call pre-enterprise architecture work, probably about 30 years, and I first met John Zachman well over 20 years ago.

Brown
In addition to being an enterprise architect I am also a University Professor at California State University, Los Angeles. My focus there is on Organizational Communications. While being a professor, I always have been involved in doing contract consulting for companies like Digital Equipment Corporation, ASK, AT and T, NCR, then Ptech.

About 15 years ago, a colleague of mine and I founded the FEAC Institute. The initial name for that was the Federal Enterprise Architecture Certification Institute, and then we changed it to Federated. It actually goes by both names.

The business driver of that was the Clinger–Cohen Bill in 1996 when it was mandated by government that all federal agencies must have an enterprise architecture.

And then around 2000, they began to enforce that regulation. My business partner at that time, Felix Rausch, and I felt that we need some certification in how to go about doing and meeting those requirements, both for the federal agencies and the Department of Defense. And so that's when we created the FEAC Institute.

Beginning of FEAC

In our first course, we had the Executive Office of the President, US Department of Fed, which I believe was the first Department of the Federal Government that was hit by OMB which held up their budget for not having an enterprise architecture on file. So they were pretty desperate, and that began the first of the beginning of the FEAC.

Forde
Since that time, a lot of people have come in from the commercial world and from international areas. And the idea of FEAC was that you start off with learning how to do enterprise architecture. In a lot of programs, including TOGAF, you sort of have to already know a little bit about enterprise architecture, the hermeneutical circle. You have to know what it is to know.

In FEAC we had a position that you want to provide training and educating in how to do enterprise architecture that will get you from a beginning state to be able to take full responsibility for work doing enterprise architecture in a matter of three months. It’s associated with the California State University System, and you can get, if you so desire, 12 graduate academic units in Engineering Management that can be applied toward a degree or you can get continuing education units.

So that’s how we began that. Then, a couple of years ago, my business partner decided he wanted to retire, and fortunately there was this guy named John Zachman, who will never retire. He's a lot younger than all of us in this room, right? So he purchased the FEAC Institute.

I still maintain a relationship with it as Academic Director, in which primarily my responsibilities are as a liaison to the universities. My colleague, Cort Coghill, is sort of the Academic Coordinator of the FEAC Institute.
You're just getting a snapshot in time and you're really not having an enterprise architecture that is able to adapt and change. You might be able to have a picture of it, but that’s all you really have.

FEAC is an organization that also incorporates a lot of the training and education programs of Zachman International, which includes managing the FEAC TOGAF courses, as well as the Zachman certified courses, which we will tell you more about.

I'm just a little bit surprised by this idea, the panel, the way we are constructed here, because I didn’t have a presentation. I'm doing it off the top, as you can see. I was told we are supposed to have a panel discussion about the synergies of enterprise architecture. So I prepared in my mind the synergies between the different enterprise architectures that are out there.

For that, I just wanted to make a strong point. I wanted to talk about synergy like a bifurcation between on the one hand, "TOGAF and Zachman" as being standing on one side, whereas the statement has been made earlier this morning and throughout the meeting is "TOGAF and."

Likewise, we have Zachman, and it’s not "Zachman or, but it’s "Zachman and." Zachman provides that ontology, as John talks about it in his periodic table of basic elements of primitives through which we can constitute any enterprise architecture. To attempt to build an architecture out of composites and then venting composites and just modeling you're just getting a snapshot in time and you're really not having an enterprise architecture that is able to adapt and change. You might be able to have a picture of it, but that’s all you really have.

That’s the power of The Zachman Framework. Hopefully, most of you will attend our demonstration this afternoon and a workshop where we are actually going to have people work with building primitives and looking at the relationship of primitives, the composites with a case study.

Getting lost

On the other side of that, Schekkerman wrote something about the forest of architectural frameworks and getting lost in that. There are a lot of enterprise architectural frameworks out there.

I'm not counting TOGAF, because TOGAF has its own architectural content metamodel, with its own artifacts, but those does not require one to use the artifacts in the architectural content metamodel. They suggest that you can use DoDAF. You can use MODAF. You can use commercial ones like NCR’s GITP. You can use any one.

Those are basically the competing models. Some of them are commercial-based, where organizations have their own proprietary stamps and the names of the artifacts, and the wrong names for it, and others want to give it its own take.

I'm more familiar nowadays with the governmental sectors. For example, FEAF, Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework Version 2. Are you familiar with that? Just go on the Internet, type in FEAF v2. Since Scott Bernard has been the head, he is the Chief Architect for the US Government at the OMB, he has developed a model of enterprise architecture, what he calls the Architecture Cube Model, which is an iteration off of John's, but he is pursuing a cube form rather than a triangle form.
I'm not counting TOGAF, because TOGAF has its own architectural content metamodel, with its own artifacts.

Also, for him the FEAF-II, as enterprise architecture, fits into his FEAF-II, because at the top level he has the strategic plans of an organization.

It goes down to different layers, but then, at one point, it drops off and becomes not only a solution, but it gets into the manufacturing of the solution. He has these whole series of artifacts that pertain to these different layers, but at the lower levels, you have a computer wiring closet diagram model, which is a little bit more detailed than what we would consider to be at a level of enterprise architecture.

Then you have the MODAF, the DoDAF, and all of these other ones, where a lot of those compete with each other more on the basis of political choices.

With the MODAF, the British obviously don’t want to use DoDAF, they have their own, but they are very similar to each other. One view, the acquisition view, differs from the project view, but they do the same things. You can define them in terms of each other.

Then there is the Canadian, NAF, and all that, and they are very similar. Now, we're trying to develop the unified MODAF, DoDAF, and NAF architecture, UPDM, which is still in its planning stages. So we are moving toward a more integrated system.

Allen Brown: Let’s move on to some of the questions that folks are interested in. Moving away from what the frameworks are, there is a question here. How does enterprise architecture take advantage of the impact of new emerging technologies like social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and so on?

Bidirectional change

John A. Zachman: The change can take place in the enterprise either from the top, where we change the context of the enterprise, or from the bottom, where we change the technologies.

So technology is expressed in the context of the enterprise, what I would call Rule 4, and that’s the physical domain. And it’s the same way in any other -- the building architecture, the airplane architecture, or anything. You can implement the logic, the as-designed logic, in different technologies.

Whatever the technology is, I made an observation that you want to engineer for flexibility. You separate the independent variables. So you separate the logic at Rule 3 from the physics of Rule 4, and then you can change Rule 4 without changing Rule 3. Basically that’s the idea, so you can accommodate whatever the emerging technologies are.

Bellman: I would just continue with that. I agree with John. Thinking about the synergy between the different architectures, basically every enterprise architecture contains, or should contain, considerations of those primitives. Then, it’s a matter of which a customer wants, which a customer feels comfortable with? Basically as long as you have those primitives defined, then you essentially can use any architecture. That constitute the synergy between the architectures.
One of the jobs of an enterprise architect is to establish a view of the organization that can be used to promote understanding and communicate and manage change.

Band: I agree with what's been said. It’s also true that I think that one of the jobs of an enterprise architect is to establish a view of the organization that can be used to promote understanding and communicate and manage change. With cloud-based systems, they are generally based on metadata, and the major platforms, like Salesforce.com as an example. They publish their data models and their APIs.

So I think that there’s going to be a new generation of systems that provide a continuously synchronized, real-time view of what's going on in the enterprise. So the architectural model will model this in the future, where things need to go, and they will do analyses, but we will be using cloud, big data, and even sensor technologies to understand the state of the enterprise.

Bellman: In the DoDaF 2.0, when that initially came out, I think it was six years ago or so, they have services architecture, a services view, and a systems view. And one of the points they make within the context, not as a footnote, is that they expect the systems view to sort of disappear and there will be a cloud view that will take its place. So I think you are right on that.

Chris Forde: The way I interpreted the question was, how does EA or architecture approach the things help you manage disruptive things? And if you accept the idea that enterprise architecture actually is a management discipline, it’s going to help you ask the right questions to understand what you are dealing with, where it should be positioned, what the risks and value proposition is around those particular things, whether that’s the Internet of Things, cloud computing, or all of these types of activities.

So going back to the core of what Terry’s presentation was about is a decision making framework with informed questions to help you understand what you should be doing to either mitigate the risk, take advantage of the innovation, and deploy the particular thing in a way that's useful to your business. That’s the way I read the question.

Impact of sensors

Band: Just to reinforce what Chris says, as an enterprise architect in healthcare, one of the things that I am looking at very closely is the evaluation of the impact of health sensor technology. Gartner Group says that by 2020, the average lifespan in a developed country will be increased by six months due to mobile health monitoring.

And so there are vast changes in the whole healthcare delivery system, of which my company is at the center as a major healthcare payer and investor in all sorts of healthcare companies. I use enterprise architecture techniques to begin to understand the impact of that and show the opportunities to our health insurance business.

Brown: If you think about social and mobile and you look at the entire enterprise architecture, now you are starting to expand that beyond the limits of the organization, aren’t you? You're starting to look at, not just the organization and the ecosystem, your business partners, but you are also looking at the impact of bringing mobile devices into the organization, of managers doing things on their own with cloud that wasn't part of the architecture. You have got the relationship with consumers out there that are using social and mobile. How do you capture all of that in enterprise architecture?
An architecture can help you within your enterprise understand those things and it can help you connect to other enterprises or other information sources to allow you to make sense of all those things.

Forde: Allen, if I had the answer to that question I would form my own business and I would go sell it.

Back in the day, when I was working in large organizations, we were talking about the extended enterprise, that kind of ecosystem view of things. And at that time the issue was more problematic. We knew we were in an extended ecosystem, but we didn't really have the technologies that effectively supported it.

The types of technologies that are available today, the ones that The Open Group has white papers about -- cloud computing, the Internet of Things, this sort of stuff -- architectures can help you classify those things. And the technologies that are being deployed can help you track them, and they can help you track them not as documents of the instance, but of the thing in real time that is talking to you about what its state is, and what its future state will be, and then you have to manage that information in vast quantities.

So an architecture can help you within your enterprise understand those things and it can help you connect to other enterprises or other information sources to allow you to make sense of all those things. But again, it's a question of scoping, filtering, making sense, and abstracting -- that key phrase that John pointed out earlier, of abstracting this stuff up to a level that is comprehensible and not overwhelming.

Brown: So Iver, at Cambia Health, you must have this kind of problem now, mustn’t you?

Provide value

Band: That's exactly what I am doing. I am figuring out what will be the impact of certain technologies and how our businesses can use them to differentiate and provide value.

In fact, I was just on a call this morning with JeffSTAT, because the whole ecosystem is changing, and we know that healthcare is really changing. The current model is not financially sustainable, and there is also tremendous amount of waste in our healthcare system today. The executives of our company say that about a third of the $2.7 trillion and rising spent on healthcare in the US doesn't do anyone any good.

There's a tremendous amount of IT investment in that, and that requires architecture to tie it altogether. It has to do with all the things ranging from the logic with which we edit claims, to the follow-up we provide people with particularly dangerous and consequently expensive diseases. So there is just a tremendous amount going through an enterprise architecture. It’s necessary to have a coherent narrative of what the organization needs to do.
The way we deal with complexity is through classification. I suggest that there is more than one way to classify things.

Bellman: One thing we all need to keep in mind is even more dynamic than that, if you believe even a little bit of Kurzweil's possibilities is that -- are people familiar with Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity Is Near' -- 2037 will be around the singularly between computers and human beings.

So I think that the wrap where he argues that the amount of change is not linear but exponential, and so in a sense you will never catch up, but you need an architecture to manage that.

Zachman: The way we deal with complexity is through classification. I suggest that there is more than one way to classify things. One is one-dimensional classification, taxonomy, or hierarchy, in effect, decompositions, one-dimensional classification, and that's really helpful for manufacturing. From an engineering standpoint of a two-dimensional classification, where we have classified things so that they are normalized, one effect in one place.

Then if you have the problems identified, you can postulate several technology changes or several changes and simulate the various implications of it.

The whole reason why I do architecture has to do with change. You deal with extreme complexity and then you have to accommodate extreme change. There is no other way to deal with it. Humanity, for thousands of years, has not been able to figure out a better way to deal with complexity and change other than architecture.

Forde: Maybe we shouldn't apply architecture to some things.

For example, maybe the technologies or the opportunity is so new, we need to have the decision-making framework that says, you know what, let's not try and figure out all this, just to self-control their stuff in advance, okay? Let's let it run and see what happens, and then when it’s at the appropriate point for architecture, let's apply it, this is a more organic view of the way nature and life works than the enterprise view of it.

So what I am saying is that architecture is not irrelevant in that context. It's actually there is a part of the decision-making framework to not architect something at this point in time because it's inappropriate to do so.

Funding and budgeting

Band: Yeah, I agree that wholeheartedly. If it can't be health solutions, we are a completely agile shop. All the technology development is on the same sprint cycle, and we have three-week sprints, but we also have certain things that are still annual and wonderful like funding and budgeting.

We live in a tension. People say, well, what are you going to do, what budget do you need, but at the same time, I haven't figured everything out. So I am constantly living in that gap of what do I need to meet a certain milestone to get my project funded, and what do I need to do to go forward? Obviously, in a fully agile organization, all those things would be fluid. But then there's financial reporting, and we would also have to be fluid too. So there are barriers to that.

For instance, the Scaled Agile Framework, which I think is a fascinating thing, has a very clear place for enterprise architecture. As Chris said, you don't want to do too much of it in advance.  I am constantly getting the gap between how can I visualize what's going to happen a year out and how can I give the development teams what they need for the sprint. So I am always living in that paradox.
“The effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, mostrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy."

Bellman: The Gartner Group, not too long ago, came up with the concept of emerging enterprise architecture and what we are dealing with. Enterprises don't exist like buildings. A building is an object, but an enterprise is a group of human beings communicating with one another.

As a very famous organizational psychologist Karl Weick once pointed out, “The effective organization is garrulous, clumsy, superstitious, hypocritical, mostrous, octopoid, wandering, and grouchy." Why? Because an organization is continually adapting, continually changing, and continually adapting to the changing business and technological landscape.

To expect anything other than that is not having a realistic view of the enterprise. It is emerging and it is a continually emerging phenomena. So in a sense, having an architecture concept I would not contest, but architecting is always worthwhile. It's like it's an organic phenomena, and that in order to deal with that what we can also understand and have an architecture for organic phenomena that change and rapidly adapt.

Brown: Chris, where you were going follows the lines of what great companies do, right?

There is a great book published about 30 years ago called ‘In Search of Excellence.’ If you haven’t read it, I suggest that people do. Written by Peters and Waterman, and Tom Peters has tried for ever since to try and recreate something with that magic, but one of the lessons learned was what great companies do, is something that goes simultaneous loose-tight properties. So you let somethings be very tightly controlled, and other things as are suggesting, let them flourish and see where they go before I actually box them in. So that’s a good thought.

So what do we think, as a panel, about evolving TOGAF to become an engineering methodology as well as a manufacturing methodology?

Zachman: I really think it’s a good idea.

Brown: Chris, do you have any thoughts on that?

Interesting proposal

Forde: I think it’s an interesting proposal and I think we need to look at it fairly seriously. The Open Group approach to things is, don’t lock people into a specific way of thinking, but we also advocate disciplined approach to doing things. So I would susspect that we are going to be exploring John’s proposal pretty seriously.

Brown: You mentioned in your talk that decision-making process is a precondition, the decision-making process to govern IT investments, and the question that comes in is how about other types of investments including facilities, inventory and acquisitions?

Forde: The wording of the presentation was very specific. Most organizations have a process or decision-making framework on an annual basis or quarterly whatever the cycles are for allocation of funding to do X, Y or Z. So the implication wasn’t that IT was the only space that it would be applied.
In many organizations, or in a lot of organizations, the IT function is essentially an enterprise-wide activity that’s supporting the financial activities, the plant activities, these sorts of things.

However, the question is how effective is that decision-making framework? In many organizations, or in a lot of organizations, the IT function is essentially an enterprise-wide activity that’s supporting the financial activities, the plant activities, these sorts of things. So you have the P and Ls from those things flowing in some way into the funding that comes to the IT organization.

The question is, when there are multiple complexities in an organization, multiple departments with independent P and Ls, they are funding IT activities in a way that may not be optimized, may or may not be optimized. For the architects, in my view, one of the avenues for success is in inserting yourself into that planning cycle and influencing,  because normally the architecture team does not have direct control over the spend, but influencing how that spend goes.

Over time gradually improving the enterprise’s ability to optimize and make effective the funding it applies for IT to support the rest of the business.

Zachman: Yeah, I was just wondering, you’ve got to make observation.

Band: I agree, I think that the battle to control shadow IT has been permanently lost. We are in a technology obsessed society. Every department wants to control some technology and even develop it to their needs. There are some controls that you do have, and we do have some, but we have core health insurance businesses that are nearly a 100 years old.

Cambia is constantly investing and acquiring new companies that are transforming healthcare. Cambia has over a 100 million customers all across the country even though our original business was a set of regional health plans.

Build relationships

You can't possibly rationalize all of everything I want you to pay for on that thing. It is incumbent upon the architects, especially the senior ones, to build relationships with the people in these organizations and make sure everything is synergetic.

Many years ago, there was a senior architect. I asked him what he did, and he said, "Well, I'm just the glue. I go to a lot of meetings." There are deliverables and deadlines too, but there is a part of consistently building the relationships and noticing things, so that when there is time to make a decision or someone needs something, it gets done right.

Zachman: I was in London when Bank of America got bought by NationsBank, and it was touted as the biggest banking merger in the history of the banking industry.
If I was the CEO and my strategy was to grow by acquisition, I would get really interested in enterprise architecture.

Actually it wasn’t a merger, it was an acquisition NationsBank acquired Bank of America and then changed the name to Bank of America. There was a London paper that was  observing that the headline you always see is, “The biggest merger in the history of the industry.” The headline you never see is, “This merger didn't work.”

The cost of integrating the two enterprises exceeded the value of the acquisition. Therefore, we’re going to have to break this thing up in pieces and sell off the pieces as surreptitiously as possible, so nobody will notice that we buried any accounting notes someplace or other. You never see that article. You’ll only see the one about the biggest merger.

If I was the CEO and my strategy was to grow by acquisition, I would get really interested in enterprise architecture. Because you have to be able to anticipate the integration of the cost, if you want to merge two enterprises. In fact, you’re changing the scope of the enterprise. I have talked a little bit about the role on models, but you are changing the scope. As soon as you change a scope, you’re now going to be faced with an integration issue.

Therefore you have to make a choice, scrap and rework. There is no way, after the fact, to integrate parts that don’t fit together. So you’re gong to be faced a decision whether you want to scrap and rework or not. I would get really interested in enterprise architecture, because that's what you really want to know before you make the expenditure. You acquire and obviously you've already blown out all the money. So now you’ve got a problem.

Once again, if I was the CEO and I want to grow by acquisition or merger acquisition, I would get really interested in enterprise architecture.

Cultural issues

Beryl Bellman: One of the big problems we are addressing here is also the cultural and political problems of organizations or enterprises. You could have the best design type of system, and if people and politics don't agree, there are going to be these kind of conflicts.

I was involved in my favorite projects at consulting. I was involved in consulting with NCR, who was dealing with Hyundai and Samsung and trying to get them together at a conjoint project. They kept fighting with each other in terms of knowledge management, technology transfer, and knowledge transfer. My role of it was to do an architecture of that whole process.

It was called RIAC Research Institute in Computer Technology. On one side of the table, you had Hyundai and Samsung. On the other side of the table, you had NCR. They were throwing PowerPoint slides back and forth at each other. I brought up that the software we used at that time was METIS, and METIS modeled all the processes, everything that was involved.
The frameworks are about creating shared understanding of what we have and where are we going to go, and the frameworks are just a set of tools that you have in your toolbox that most people don't understand.

Samsung said you just hit it with a 2×4. I used to be demonstrating it, rather than tossing out slides, here are the relationships, and be able to show that it really works. To me that was a real demonstration that I can even overcome some of the politics and cultural differences within enterprises.

Brown: I want to give one more question. I think this is more of a concern that we have raised in some people's minds today, which is, we are talking about all these different frameworks and ontologies, and so there is a first question.

The second one is probably the key one that we are looking at, but it asks what does each of the frameworks lack, what are the key elements that are missing, because that leads on to the second question that says, isn't needing to understand old enterprise architecture frameworks is not a complex exercise for a practitioner?

Band: My job is not about understanding frameworks. I have been doing enterprises solution architecture in HP at a standard and diversified financial services company and now at health insurance and health solutions company out for quite a while, and it’s really about communicating and understanding in a way that's useful to your stakeholders.

The frameworks are about creating shared understanding of what we have and where are we going to go, and the frameworks are just a set of tools that you have in your toolbox that most people don't understand.

So the idea is not to understand everything but to get a set of tools, just like a mechanic would, that you carry around that you use all the time. For instance, there are certain types of ArchiMate views that I use when I am in a group. I will draw an ArchiMate business process view with application service use of the same. What are the business processes you need to be and what are the exposed application behaviors that they need to consume?

I had that discussion with people on the business who are in IT, and we drove those diagrams. That's a useful tool, it works for me, it works for the people around me, it works in my culture, but there is no understanding over frameworks unless that's your field of study. They are all missing the exact thing you need for a particular interaction, but most likely there is something in there that you can base the next critical interaction on.

Six questions

Zachman: I spent most of my life thinking about my frameworks. There are six questions you have to answer to have a complete description of whatever it is, what I will describe, what, how, where, who, and why. So that’s complete.

The philosophers have established six transformations interestingly enough, the transfer of idea into an instantiation, so that's a complete set, and I did not invent either one of these, so the six interrogatives. They have the six stages of transformation and that framework has to, by definition, accommodate any factor that’s relevant to the existence of the object of the enterprise.  Therefore any fact has to be classifiable in that structure.

My framework is complete in that regard. For many years, I would have been reluctant to make a categorical statement, but we exercised this, and there is no anomaly. I can’t find an anomaly. Therefore I have a high level of confidence that you can classify any fact in that context.

There is one periodic table. There are n different compound manufacturing processes. You can manufacture anything out of the periodic table. That metaphor is really helpful. There's one enterprise architecture framework ontology. I happened to stumble across, by accident, the ontology for classifying all of the facts relevant to an enterprise.
In terms of completeness I think my framework is complete. I can find no anomalies and you can classify anything relative to that framework.

I wish I could tell you that I was so smart and understood all of these things at the beginning, but I knew nothing about this, I just happened to stumble across it. The framework fell on my desk one day and I saw the pattern. All I did was I put enterprise names on the same pattern for descriptive representation of anything. You’ve heard me tell quite a bit of the story this afternoon. In terms of completeness I think my framework is complete. I can find no anomalies and you can classify anything relative to that framework.

And I agree with Iver, that there are n different tools you might want to use. You don’t have to know everything about every framework. One thing is, whatever the tool is that you need to deal with and out of the context of the periodic table metaphor, the ontological construct of The Zachman Framework, you can accommodate whatever artifacts the tool creates.

You don’t have to analyze every tool, whatever tool is necessary, if you want to do with business architecture, you can create whatever the business architecture manifestation is. If you want to know what DoDAF is, you can create the DoDAF artifacts. You can create any composite, and you can create any compound from the periodic table. It’s the same idea.

I wouldn't spend my life trying to understand all these frameworks. You have to operate the enterprise, you have to manage the enterprise and whatever the tool is, it’s required to do whatever it is that you need to do and there is something good about everything and nothing necessarily does everything.

So use the tool that's appropriate and then you can create whatever the composite constructs are required by that tool out of the primitive components of the framework. I wouldn’t try to understand all the frameworks.

What's missing

Forde: On a daily basis there is a line of people at these conferences coming to tell me what’s missing from TOGAF. Recently we conducted a survey through the Association of Enterprise Architects about what people needed to see. Basically the stuff came back pretty much, please give us more guidance that’s specific to my situation, a recipe for how to solve world hunger, or something like that. We are not in the role of providing that level of prescriptive detail.

The value side of the equation is the flexibility of the framework to a certain degree to allow many different industries and many different practitioners drive value for their business out of using that particular tool.

So some people will find value in the content metamodel in the TOGAF Framework and the other components of it, but if you are not happy with that, if it doesn't meet your need, flip over to The Zachman Framework or vice versa.

John made it very clear earlier that the value in the framework that he has built throughout his career and has been used repeatedly around the world is its rigor, it’s comprehensiveness, but he made very clear, it’s not a method. There is nothing in there to tell you how to go do it.
The value side of the equation is the flexibility of the framework to a certain degree to allow many different industries and many different practitioners drive value for their business out of using that particular tool.

So you could criticize The Zachman Framework for a lack of method or you could spend your time talking about the value of it as a very useful tool to get X, Y, and Z done.

From a practitioner’s standpoint, what one practitioner does is interesting in a value, but if you have a practice between 200 and 400 architects, you don't want everybody running around like a loose cannon doing it their way, in my opinion. As a practice manager or leader you need something that makes those resources very, very effective. And when you are in a practice of that size, you probably have a handful of people trying to figure out how the frameworks come together, but most of the practitioners are tasked with taking what the organization says is their best practice and executing on it.

We are looking at improving the level of guidance provided by the TOGAF material, the standard and guidance about how to do specific scenarios.

For example, how to jumpstart an architecture practice, how to build a secure architecture, how to do business architecture well? Those are the kinds of things that we have had feedback on and we are working on around that particular specification.

Brown: So if you are employed by the US Department of Defense you would be required to use DoDAF, if you are an enterprise architect, because of the views it provides. But people like Terri Blevins that did work in the DoD many years, used TOGAF to populate DoDAF. It’s a method, and the method is the great strength.

If you want to have more information on that, there are a number of white papers on our website about using TOGAF with DoDAF, TOGAF with COBIT, TOGAF with Zachman, TOGAF with everything else.

Forde: TOGAF with frameworks, TOGAF with buy in, the thing to look at is the ecosystem of information around these frameworks is where the value proposition really is. If you are trying to bootstrap your standards practice inside, the framework is of interest, but applied use, driving to the value proposition for your business function is the critical area to focus on.

This panel discussion examined the synergy among the major EA frameworks, and consisted of moderator Allen Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Open Group; Iver Band, an Enterprise Architect at Cambia Health Solutions; Dr. Beryl Bellman, Academic Director, FEAC Institute; John Zachman, Chairman and CEO of Zachman International, and originator of the Zachman Framework, and Chris Forde, General Manager, Asia and Pacific Region and Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, The Open Group.

Transcript of a live panel discussion at last month's The Open Group San Diego 2015. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Friday, February 27, 2015

Mobility Moves from 'Nice to Have' to 'Must Have' for Large US Healthcare Insurer

A BriefingsDirect interview on how mobility proves a game-changer in the newly changing landscape of healthcare insurance.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect interview, coming to you from the recent Kony World 2015 Conference in Orlando.

Gardner
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility. We're here to explore advancements in mobile applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.

Our next innovation interview focuses on how a large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make mobility a business strength.

To learn how, please join me now in welcoming our guest, Scott Jessee, Vice President of IT for an Illinois health insurance provider. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Scott.

Scott Jessee: Thanks, Dana, I appreciate it.

Gardner: Help us understand, first and foremost, where your organization is in regard to mobility. Are you taking requests from individual parts of your company, the one-off app, are you yet progressing toward lifecycle, or a strategic approach to mobility? Where do you stand?

Jessee: It’s important to think about where we came from. When we started off in mobile, it was not an imperative. It was not something where we had to get in. It was a nice-to-have that was in the forefront, but there wasn’t enough return on investment (ROI) in people’s minds. That shifted quickly in our business model when -- from a sales’ perspective -- it became an absolute requirement that we needed to have mobile in order for us to complete our sales.

Jessee
So fast-forward to where we are now. We've been running with this for a little bit and we're primarily focusing on the consumer market, which is also exciting for us. We're in healthcare, and with the Affordable Care Act, and with lot of shifts and distribution channels, there has been a stronger need for us to have to focus on the consumer.

From a mobile perspective, most of our feedback and requests are driven in that fashion. We had to ask, "What could we do to engage through mobility? What could we do to give them more value as a product through mobility? And, how could we give it to them in a fast manner?" All those dimensions are hitting us pretty heavy right now in terms of what we are trying to think ahead for.

Gardner: Are you delivering mobility on an application-by-application basis? Or can you create a significant platform or reuse benefit in how you produce mobile applications?

Focus on multichannel

Jessee: For us, one of the biggest things from that point of view is getting a mobile application at the consumer level where we permanently focus on multichannel. That's huge for us, because the market is demanding you to have multiple devices, and there are more-and-more devices each and every year.

You have Samsung for the Android side, you have your iOS Apple on your Apple side, and then you have the tablets and smartphones and soon-to-be wearable devices. There is a plethora of different demands that people want to consume the information transaction that you get them in order to have the experience that they want.

From our perspective, we try to be as savvy as we can with that, and we leverage the Kony Platform to help us achieve that. We wouldn't be able to have as lean of a staff as we do to help support and drive that forward. And it’s primarily because the fact we can do some level of "develop once" and then deliver out through these different devices over a period of time. So it’s been big gains for us.

Gardner: What are the business benefits that going with mobile apps bring?
When they come to us with new pieces that they want, we can typically do it in six to eight weeks, compared to a three- or four-month cycle on the website.

Jessee: We get feedback on from our business folks that it's different than the web. We're able to deliver faster than we can in the web apps space. They're more satisfied on delivery time and cycle time. When they come to us with new pieces that they want, we can typically do it in six to eight weeks, compared to a three- or four-month cycle on the website. That’s just the nature of what we are doing. So they smile with us a little more in the mobile space, which is good.

You hit on metrics. We have good analytics we could provide in terms of page-views that they see. If they're trying to deliver a new content or something to that effect, we could show them that this worked, and this didn't work. We also have individual plans/states that own their marketing efforts. Based on their individual campaigns, we are able to provide them metrics of a particular state is seeing an uptake in downloads or usage of the mobile app.

So those are the two key things I think that they like about what we are able to deliver with them as relates to those two concepts.

Gardner: You mentioned that sales was an early and important part of the mobile app drive. Has it progressed beyond that? Are there other aspects of the business -- whether it's closing out on insurance policies, payments, payer/provider relations in organization and management, all the above -- where you've now extended your mobile drive from that originating beachhead of sales?

Jessee: You mentioned providers and other use cases like that. They haven’t surfaced too much for us. A lot of it goes back to the Affordable Care Act and the fact that we hadn't looked at consumers for such a long time. We date back in healthcare for the longest period, and it hasn't always been about the consumer, because that's not how we made our money or progressed forward to the revenue stream. Now, that’s becoming a huge piece for us.

Extend and differentiate

We're back-stepping a little bit, which is why we are investing so much time. The consumer use case is such a big and important example because want to try to not just hit parity, but we want to also extend and differentiate beyond that.

So we are playing a little bit of catch-up in that regard. The other piece that we see does tie back to the sales piece as well, which is, if we could show differentiation through the sales channel, we could say to brokers that this is what we are doing to help improve wellness and improve access to care. It ends up heading these other use case examples you talk about indirectly, not necessarily directly, but ultimately. That's the hopeful outcome that we get out of it.

Gardner: Now, we're here at Kony World 2015, and one of the things we're hearing about is the importance of the user experience. Now that you're dealing with the Affordable Care Act, you're in more of a marketplace. The way in which your application comes across to a prospective insurance client compares to the other insurance organizations that they might be perusing. So how does the user experience factor into your development and deployment strategy, and how is Kony helping you with that?

Jessee: The big thing this week here at Kony World that was exciting to us is seeing the further enhancements of their Visualizer 2.0 product. Visualizer 2.0 allows marketing and communication leaders to sit up front and design the look/feel of a mobile application using an Adobe Photoshop-type experience. Our marketing communication teams demand this, because user experience is king.
The new imperative is consumer experience. You need to have something that people can use easily.

The new imperative is consumer experience. You need to have something that people can use easily, efficiently, and meet the demands that they're looking for as it relates to the functions they need to accomplish, and then beyond that what's your other value opportunities.

Kony does a great job of setting us up for success in that regard. In addition to the productivity gains we get out of this, they have good tools that will help us provide this customer experience in ways that we could show marketing communications to ask, "What do you think. Let's tweak it. Let’s alter it."

We could leverage agency input in a more efficient streamlined manner for the user interfaces that we create. So all those things are really going to springboard us forward, so we are not spending as much time doing it. From the visual consuming perspective, it should be a better experience, and that’s what we are hoping to get out of it, and showcasing the future opportunities there, too.

Gardner: The thing that’s been intriguing for me here at Kony World is I see their application marketplace and the new application, Kony Sales. This might not be an exact fit for you and your vertical industry, but it seems to me that they're taking a step toward having a packaged application targeted at a specific industry that takes you maybe 80 percent of the way you need to be with a lot of the back-end integration in place, with a lot of the ability to customize, but still governed by the IT department.

So, as the IT person, you're going to get a control over who can do what, but you're also going to have your end users, your line-of-business customers, getting a say as to what their app can do and can't do. It strikes me that another important part of user experience is having more say in an app and being part of the development process.

A step forward

Jessee: That's a big jump. I talked to [Kony CEO] Tom Hogan yesterday and he explained it really well, and he relates well to business users, too. Think of what’s going on with Salesforce, and how those constituencies and stakeholders that leverage that are used to configuring an application base or micro-applications. This is really taking Kony a step forward in meeting that marketplace and even extend it beyond that with the release of the both the marketplace and the two ready-to-go applications.

That's the opportunity at hand for potential business folks, as they've already been doing some of this today in some of the other venues, and now they have an opportunity to do this with Kony.

As an IT person, where we could really take advantage of it, is to reduce our workload with some of the configuration components, so it’s little off our hands. We could focus more on the marketplace, which would allow us to create these micro apps, these core functional areas, that we could then showcase, drop in, share, etc. That really puts us in a good position in terms of facilitating innovation, which obviously is hot in healthcare and all industries, but helps you further move that ball forward.

Gardner: What about the issue of security? Because you're in healthcare and regulatory compliance is so important, how do you see the security with the mobile application developing, and how again does that integrated platform -- write once, run everywhere -- benefit you?
That's the opportunity at hand for potential business folks, as they've already been doing some of this today in some of the other venues, and now they have an opportunity to do this with Kony.

Jessee: That’s a really hard part, especially in mobile. If you think back 10 years ago on the web space, security was probably where mobile is now. In 2013, there were no publicized or known mobile risks that were made, but in 2014 I think there were 9 or 10. So that was a big jump from 0 to 9 or 10 of big named companies.

What’s ahead in 2015 is even scarier, but that relates to what Kony offers. Tom Hogan showed today what they're trying to drive toward, and he used the acronym S-A-U-C-E to describe the value they are driving with their solutions: Security, Agility, Usability, Certainty, and Efficiency. The first one being security in priority order, which puts me at ease.

One of the things that has helped is through some of the security components in Kony. They've been pretty up-to-date with some of the trends that we pull from our third-party auditors that are looking at our mobile applications. It showcases things like SSL pinning, including that in your code, and helping you facilitate the transactions the right way. So that’s a good thing for us.

I think an opportunity for Kony is to continue to showcase those specifics to not just the customer base but the non-customer base. Mobile is going to continue to get exponentially more challenging when it comes to security, because the threats out there are just starting to hit it and they are just getting fresh into it.

Internet of Things

Gardner: Looking forward now to what’s going to come down the highway. We hear about the Internet of Things. We're seeing more and more, in healthcare, data being derived from sensors and devices, and we are seeing closer partnership between payers and providers when it comes to data sharing in the healthcare sector. So where does healthcare and mobility go for you over the next three to five years?

There was another interesting tidbit here at the show, where they said IDC is projecting that by 2017, 25 percent of IT budgets will be devoted in some way to mobility. Does that strike you as a low ball, and how important is mobility going to be to your IT budget?

Jessee: From a budgetary perspective that’s probably a fair guess, because mobility is also being redefined over time. A few years ago, it was just a smartphone, but now it’s people moving around, doing activities, transacting against a multitude of different devices, and I think wearable is a great example of that.
Mobile is going to continue to get exponentially more challenging when it comes to security, because the threats out there are just starting to hit it and they are just getting fresh into it.

What do wearables mean to us? It’s an unknown for us, and it’s on our radar that we need to identify some potential use cases, but we haven’t seen enough of it yet. We've got the Fitbits that are out there that are pretty hot, but now you have got the watches that are coming out. Samsung had theirs last year; Apple is doing theirs this year. What is that going to look like? We are not a 100 percent sure yet.

From our perspective, it’s making sure we have a flag against it for us to see what we could potentially do. It’s a little abstract for us to actually activate against, but we're not leaving it to rest either.

Gardner: And the issue about the sensors and the Internet of Things. Do you consider that mobility or is that a separate area, big data perhaps? How do you see the mobile drive for user experience and life cycle benefits now, and how does that compare to that Internet of Things and sensors and data in healthcare?

Jessee: It’s both. When you say mobility and big data, it goes two ways. One, it’s the consuming of these different sensors across mobile devices and mobile transactions that take place.

The other thing that happens is on the big data front is that it’s an opportunity to collect data and understand your consumer base, to understand your providers, to make better decisions, to help add value along the chain. But it’s two-way information that you have to collect in order to really activate both sides of the house, but they play together. They both have to.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning about how advancements in mobile applications, design, and deployment technologies are bringing new productivity benefits across the growing spectrum of edge devices in mobile applications’ life cycle. We have also seen how quality, speed and value are rapidly increasing, thanks to the Kony Mobility Platform.

So a big thank you to our guest, Scott Jessee, Vice President for IT at a large Illinois healthcare insurance provider. Thanks so much, Scott.

Jessee: Thank you, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience for joining this special podcast series, coming to you from the recent Kony World 2015 Conference in Orlando.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Kony-sponsored BriefingsDirect IT discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.

A BriefingsDirect interview on how mobility proves a game-changer in the newly changing landscape of healthcare insurance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Thursday, February 26, 2015

RealTime Medicare Data Delivers Caregiver Trends Insights By Taming its Huge Healthcare Data Trove

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare data collection site met the challenge of increasing volumes by using HP tools.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HP Discover Podcast Series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing sponsored discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner
Once again, we're focusing on how companies are adapting to the new style of IT to improve IT performance and deliver better user experiences, as well as better business results.

This time, we're coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here to learn directly from IT and business leaders alike how big data, cloud, and converged infrastructure implementations are supporting their goals.
   
Our next innovation case study interview highlights how RealTime Medicare Data analyzes huge volumes of Medicare data and provides analysis to their many customers on the caregiver side of the healthcare sector.
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Here to explain how they manage such large data requirements for quality, speed, and volume, we're joined by Scott Hannon, CIO of RealTime Medicare Data and he's based in Birmingham, Alabama. Welcome, Scott.

Scott Hannon: Thank you.

Gardner:  First, tell us a bit about your organization and some of the major requirements you have from an IT perspective.

Hannon: RealTime Medicare Data has full census Medicare, which includes Part A and Part B, and we do analysis on this data. We provide reports that are in a web-based tool to our customers who are typically acute care organizations, such as hospitals. We also do have a product that provides analysis specific to physicians and their billing practices.

Gardner:  And, of course, Medicare is a very large US government program to provide health insurance to the elderly and other qualifying individuals.

Hannon: Yes, that’s true.

Gardner: So what sorts of data requirements have you had? Is this a volume, a velocity, a variety type of the problem, all the above?

Volume problem

Hannon: It’s been mostly a volume problem, because we're actually a very small company. There are only three of us in the IT department, but it was just me as the IT department, back when I started in 2007.

Hannon
At that time, we had one state, Alabama and then, we began to grow. We grew to seven states which was the South region: Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. We found that Microsoft SQL Server was not really going to handle the type of queries that we did with the volume of data.

Currently we have 18 states. We're loading about a terabyte of data per year, which is about 630 million claims and our database currently houses about 3.7 billion claims.

Gardner: That is some serious volume of data. From the analytics side, what sort of reporting do you do on that data, who gets it, and what are some of their requirements in terms of how they like to get strategic benefit from this analysis.

Hannon: Currently, most of our customers are general acute-care hospitals. We have a web-based tool that has reports in it. We provide reports that start at the physician level. We have reports that start at the provider level. We have reports that you can look at by state.
This allows them to look not only at themselves, but to compare themselves to other places, like their market, the region, and the state.

The other great thing about our product is that typically providers have data on themselves, but they can't really compare themselves to the providers in their market or state or region. So this allows them to look not only at themselves, but to compare themselves to other places, like their market, the region, and the state.

Gardner: I should think that’s hugely important, given that Medicare is a very large portion of funding for many of these organizations in terms of their revenue. Knowing what the market does and how they compare to it is essential.

Hannon: Typically, for a hospital, about 40 to 45 percent of their revenue depends on Medicare. The other thing that we've found is that most physicians don't change how they practice medicine based on whether it’s a Medicare patient, a Blue Cross patient, or whoever their private insurance is.

So the insights that they gain by looking at our reports are pretty much 90 to 95 percent of how their business is going to be running.

Gardner: It's definitely mission-critical data then. So you started with a relational database, using standard off-the-shelf products. You grew rapidly, and your volume issues grew. Tell us what the problems were and what requirements you had that led you to seek an alternative.

Exponential increase

Hannon: There were a couple of problems. One, obviously, was the volume. We found that we had to increase the indexes exponentially, because we're talking about 95 percent reads here on the database. As I said, the Microsoft SQL Server really was not able to handle that volume as we expanded.

The first thing we tried was to move to an analysis services back end. For that project, we got an outside party to help us because we would need to redesign our front end completely to be able to query analysis services.

It just so happened that that project was taking way too long to implement. I started looking at other alternatives and, just by pure research, I happened to find Vertica. I was reading about it and thought "I'm not sure how this is even possible." It didn’t even seem possible to be able to do this with this amount of data.

So we got a trial of it. I started using it and was impressed that it actually could do what it said it could do.
and gain access to the
FREE HP Vertica Community Edition
Gardner: As I understand it, Vertica has the column store architecture. Was that something understood? What is it about the difference of the Vertica approach to data -- one that perhaps caught your attention at first, and how has that worked out for you?

Hannon: To me the biggest advantages were the fact that it uses the standard SQL query language, so I wouldn't have to learn the MDX, which is required with the analysis services. I don’t understand the complete technical details about column storage, but I understand that it's much faster and that it doesn't have to look at every single row. It can build the actual data set much faster, which gives you much better performance on the front end.

Gardner: And what sort of performance have you had?

Hannon: Typically we have seen about a tenfold decrease in actual query performance time. Before, when we would run reports, it would take about 20 minutes. Now, they take roughly two minutes. We're very happy about that.

Gardner: How long has it been since you implemented HP Vertica and what are some of supporting infrastructures that you've relied on?

Hannon: We implemented Vertica back in 2010. We ended up still utilizing the Microsoft SQL Server as a querying agent, because it was much easier to continue to interface the SQL reporting services, which is what our web-based product uses. And the stored procedure functionality that was in there and also the open query feature.

So we just pull the data directly from Vertica and then send it through Microsoft SQL Server to the reporting services engine.

New tools

Gardner: I've heard from many organizations that not only has this been a speed and volume issue, but there's been an ability to bring new tools to the process. Have you changed any of the tooling that you've used for analysis? How have you gone about creating your custom reports?

Hannon: We really haven't changed the reports themselves. It's just that I know when I design a query to pull a specific set of data that I don’t have to worry that it's going to take me 20 minutes to get some data back. I'm not saying that in Vertica every query is 30 seconds, but the majority of the queries that I do use don’t take that long to bring the data back. It’s much improved over the previous solution that we were using.

Gardner: Are there any other quality issues, other than just raw speeds and feeds issues, that you've encountered? What are some of the paybacks you've gotten as a result of this architecture?
But I will tell people to not be afraid of Linux, because Vertica runs on Linux and it’s easy.

Hannon: First of all, I want to say that I didn’t have a lot of experience with Unix or Linux on the back end and I was a little bit rusty on what experience I did have. But I will tell people to not be afraid of Linux, because Vertica runs on Linux and it’s easy. Most of the time, I don’t even have to mess with it.

So now that that's out of the way, some of the biggest advantages of Vertica is the fact that you can expand to multiple nodes to handle the load if you've got a larger client base. It’s very simple. You basically just install commodity hardware, but whatever flavor of Unix or Linux that you prefer, as long as it’s compatible, the installation does all the rest for you, as long as you tell it you're doing multiple nodes.

The other thing is the fact that you have multiple nodes that allow for fault tolerance. That was something that we really didn't have with our previous solution. Now we have fault tolerance and load balancing.

Gardner: Any lessons learned, as you made this transition from a SQL database to a Vertica columnar store database? You even moved the platform from Windows to Linux. What might you tell others who are pursuing a shift in their data strategy because they're heading somewhere else?

Jump right in

Hannon: As I said before, don’t be afraid of Linux. If you're a Microsoft or a Mac shop, just don’t be afraid to jump in. Go get the free community edition or talk to a salesperson and try it out. You won't be disappointed. Since the time we started using it, they have made multiple improvements to the product.

The other thing that I learned was that with OPENQUERY, there are specific ways that you have to write the store procedures. I like to call it "single-quote hell," because when you write OPENQUERY and you have to quote something, there are a lot of other additional single quotes that you have put in there. I learned that there was a second way of doing it that lessened that impact.

Gardner: Okay, good. And we're here at HP Discover. What's interesting for you to learn here at the show and how does that align with what your next steps are in your evolution?

Hannon:  I'm definitely interested in seeing all the other capabilities that Vertica has and seeing how other people are using it in their industry and for their customers.
I'm definitely interested in seeing all the other capabilities that Vertica has and seeing how other people are using it in their industry and for their customers.

Gardner: In terms of your deployment, are you strictly on-premises for the foreseeable future? Do you have any interest in pursuing a hybrid or cloud-based deployments for any of your data services?

Hannon: We actually use a private cloud, which is hosted at TekLinks in Birmingham. We've been that way ever since we started, and that seems to work well for us, because we basically just rent rack space and provide our own equipment. They have the battery backup, power backup generators, and cooling.

Gardner: How about backup and recovery? How were those issues managed for you?

Hannon: We have multiple copies of it on multiple server systems and we also do cloud backup.

Gardner: I see. So you've got a separate location in the cloud that you use, should something unfortunate happen.

Hannon: Correct.

Gardner: So a good insurance for a Medicare insurance database.

Hannon: Absolutely.

Gardner: Okay. We’ll leave it there. Please join me in thanking our guest. We've been talking about how RealTime Medicare Data is managing a huge volume of data and providing analysis to care providers in 18 states in the US.
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So a big thank you to Scott Hannon, CIO at RealTime Medicare Data in Birmingham, Alabama. Thanks.

Hannon: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks also to our audience for joining us for this special new style of IT discussion coming to you directly from the recent HP Discover 2014 Conference in Las Vegas.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HP sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how a healthcare data collection site met the challenge of increasing volumes by using HP tools. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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