The Healthcare Data Conundrum

This week I attended a briefing by one of the senior executives of a private health fund. A fascinating and insightful talk about the changes within the industry and his view of the future of healthcare in Australia, so here are a few things he said that caught my attention.

If you have read my blog before you would know that I’m a firm believer in ‘Data’ being the source of the answers we need to keep our healthcare system going and progressing! He said a few discouraging things about the current situation with regards to data…

• 30% of claims from institutions are made by paper! Astonishing as according to Wikipedia, (here), in.. “1979: Michael Aldrich demonstrates the first online shopping system”, wow begs the question doesn’t it! It just seems to me in a world where individuals can use facilities like PayPal to set up a personal e-commerce, it would be pervasive in any industry. (For fun there is some suggestion that students in 1971/2 at MIT and Stanford used Arpanet, the precursor of the internet, to arrange the sale of marijuana. I’m sure it was for medicinal use!)
• “We barely know who the patient is and what was done to them, from the data we are given from some organisations!”. Which led me to believe that even if ICD-10 is being used, it is not being effective in providing adequate depth of data to aid research, etc.

Then there were the statements that I liked very much ….

• “Giving doctors comparative data is very influential in changing outcomes!” So why wouldn’t someone who has a vocation to help people not want to do the best they can? While talking about impacting people’s behaviour he mentioned the Coles/Medibank deal where people get extra benefits for purchasing fruit and vegetables!
• “Understanding waste and variation is key!”, an example he gave was that knee Arthroscopy was used 10x more often in Toorak compared to Dandenong in Victoria! I’m sure there is a medical reason rather than their capability to pay!

And there was a great analogy he used when describing the treatment of chronic diseases in a hospital. “It’s like having a single factory floor that is producing both Lego blocks and Saturn 5 rockets!” and while talking about analogous things, he also spoke about countries where they are using virtual training systems to ensure proficiency before practice! Eg: Anaesthetists who have to perform 500 virtual casts before they are let into the OR.

Finally I left a bit frustrated as there is a general recognition of what good that could come from applying modern techniques to datasets. Unfortunately it does not seem like the government is committed, the private health insurance industry has too many restrictions placed on it and the individual institutions don’t seem to be in a position to provide this. Perhaps it is time for a people’s revolution, where we all demand our health data to be available on-line, a crowdsourcing or crowd-demanding sort of approach! What do you think?

Data Can Relieve the Healthcare Budget Pressure

Interesting week in the healthcare space in Australia with the federal budget and then the Royal review’s recommendations for the PCEHR made public. We certainly live in interesting times!

I believe there is an incredible opportunity for us all, as they say in the classics ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. It seems the perfect storm is brewing; aging population, rise of chronic disease, rising costs and budget pressure. The question is how do we set a course through this storm, to ensure the destination is much better than where we have come from? (Poetic even if I say so!)

A couple of words caught my eye in the PCEHR review, ‘meaningful use’. The concept is to achieve a state where the health records are used to improve the health of the community, drive diagnosis accuracy up as well as improving the research and development of new drugs and more effective treatments. This is all about the data! Getting it to a point of completeness and accuracy so it can be used meaningfully!

This may sound familiar as its part of Obama’s plan to change healthcare in the USA. To achieve ‘meaningful use’ and they have defined a 7 stage process to guide their industry along. Similar to the Royal review’s recommendations, Obama has put in place a series of investments as well as ‘consequences’ for not achieving these milestones. When you consider the ‘private’ or corporatized nature of the USA healthcare system, you would assume that it is against their business model to help their ‘customers’ go next-door. So surely there are less vested interests here inhibiting us from creating a national health record system?

Perhaps the idea has not been fully ‘sold’ to the public and the implementation not optimal. Speak to any GP and they will bemoan the integration and the additional workload… which the review recommendations address. So once these issues are sorted out, we begin down a path where the accumulation of data drives every facet of the industry forward and towards a better, faster and cheaper healthcare system!

Marc Andreessen founder of Netscape, a web browser that competed with Microsoft in the early days of the internet is attributed to saying that “Software is eating the world.” He was referring to the dramatic shifts that happened to the music and video industries as they became digital. I think he was wrong, ‘Data is eating the world.’ It’s the use of data to understand that can transform everything we do! The trick here is to not look at digitisation as just a substitute for the old, but as a new way to do things. (For example a CD was more convenient, however on-line music has changed the industry.)

In healthcare there has been a lot of ‘substitution’ but not a great deal of leveraging the potential of eHealth. For example having an electronic patient record is more convenient, however being able to aggregate a large number of histories and understand how treatments are affected by lifestyles which affect long-term health outcomes, has the potential to produce new protocols which deliver better outcomes which will lower costs.

Thinking about the ‘use’ of data once its digital, will lead us to a situation where we are thinking beyond the horseless carriage and to driving efficiency, lowering costs and opening up new ways to revolutionise the way people are kept well.

How IT Buzzwords Impact Healthcare

Picture from: http://www.healthcarereformmagazine.com/issue-16/feature-issue-16/healthcare-cheaper-better-faster/

Every industry loves their buzz words, and IT does more than most. Today you can’t talk about technology without one of the big four, (Social, Mobile, Big Data or Cloud), being dropped into the conversation. The question is, what has this to do with Healthcare? Well let me discuss this in the next few blog posts, but first context is required.

According to many commentators, such as analyst firm IDC, IT is entering its third epoch. Starting with the birth of IT in the form of the original mainframes, through the current ‘pc’ dominated client server and into the emerging 3^rd Platform, typified by the ‘web-scale’ organisations. What I find interesting is that I can see the parallels with healthcare, let me explain.

The first platform was a time shared infrastructure which you would go with a particular job and walk away with a certain outcome. Sound like a hospital?  The issue with this model is that a massive infrastructure investment is required, and it makes use of very high levels of expertise, to use it effectively. That is why today, while there are still many mainframes in use, the ‘jobs’ they tackle are very specific to what it was designed for and where it is the most efficient way to achieve that outcome.

Today, however most computing is performed on the second platform – client server – enabled by the birth of PC’s and networks. This new model enabled new capabilities, such as interactivity, specialisation and a lower cost of production. The ‘work’ was split into different layers and specialist organisations created software solutions which automated processes.  (Think a PACS, RIS, EMR.) This structure is mostly a hub-and-spoke, with specialists performing their specific task and then passing on to the next layer. I would argue much like the delivery of healthcare outside of the hospital today, where a GP refers to a specialist that refers to an ‘ology’ that reports back to the specialist that diagnoses/treats and then reports back to the GP – each performing a task and passing off to the next entity. Now this model is effective at automating a processes but does it inherently improve that process or add to the quality of what is being done?

In my previous blog post I spoke about Big Data and some of what is enabling this… “What’s changed? Over the last decade technologies that can economically store and reason over disparate data types have been developed… (carry on reading here).”  This leads us to the 3^rd Platform, if you like consider how the ‘web scale’ organisations do what they do! Such as Amazon predicting books you would like to read, Google giving you the latest information and Facebook changing social connectivity.

What does this mean to healthcare?  You are familiar with the past, computers have helped add up numbers and do accounting, (mainframe), they have automated processes like patient record keeping and image management, (client-server), now technology is help us to predict, understand and tap into the collective. In doing this we get assistance in diagnosis, discovering new protocols and drugs, and predicting likely outcomes. The advantages to healthcare of better planning, decision support and accelerated innovation are dramatic. In essence this is the platform enable healthcare to move into ‘Personalised Wellness’ or ‘Patient Centric Healthcare’. Consider the 3rd Platform as now helping improve thinking, the human process!

Three ‘platforms’ for technology and three ‘platforms’ for healthcare delivery. The IT industry delivers better, faster and cheaper, our challenge now is to use these technologies effectively to deliver better, faster and cheaper healthcare!

Healthcare in Australia and NZ only has ‘Small Data’ – Really?

‘Big Data’ is not about BIG nor is it about DATA… but one thing I’m certain of is that these technologies and methodologies will accelerate discoveries, improve patient outcomes and dramatically reduce healthcare costs.  (The one problem is that IT vendors chose the wrong name!)

Before you stop reading, let me convince you of the merits and applicability to healthcare. Consider hip replacements, if a way was found to replace a hip so that it would never have to be redone, both patient outcome and cost would be dramatically improved. (Example from this blog post where the TED talk cites a group of doctors who collaborated, gathered data and found a pattern, which resulted in these outcomes.) Now if you could watch many hip replacements and follow the patients, given a large number of procedures, you would start to detect which ‘techniques’ resulted in the best outcome.  This is the idea of “big data”, to find these patterns automatically using computers and the available data.

What’s changed? Over the last decade technologies that can economically store and reason over disparate data types have been developed. (By different data types think about structured data, the data in a spreadsheet/database that were invented for computers, and natural data called un-structured, such as pictures, X-Rays and ECG waveforms which humans quickly make sense.) The power of these new technologies is that they bring all this information together and provide the analytic tools to find these patterns and correlations and/or create predictive models.

Sounds complicated but if there was a way to capture the data about procedures and the patient outcome overtime, ‘big data’ could find these patterns which result in the best overall outcome. Immediately the cry goes out that the healthcare professionals cannot spend time inputting more data! And they are absolutely right, these systems should aid and assist the practitioner, but let me suggest that a great deal of the data currently exists in the disparate computer systems, within monitors and the various imaging and measuring modalities, as well as on paper. While its up to the IT industry to provide the ways to extract all this information in a secure and controlled way, there are emerging technologies which will take this idea further.

One interesting and perhaps confrontational technology is video analysis. Today video analysis is used to detect ‘suspicious’ behaviour in public places, (Boston example here), helps major stores detect potential shoppers needing assistance and improve workplace practices to reduce accidents. So it is conceivable that a video of a surgical procedure could be analysed and compared with others, to provide input into the improvement cycle! Or similarly a radiologist with a tricky image could be presented with similar x-rays and the diagnoses he peers made.

In summary ‘Big Data’ is about using available data to improve processes, understand trends, find correlations and develop predictive models, while you don’t need huge amounts of data, you do need the vision to make it happen! While Australia and New Zealand lag behind in this area, I wonder if we can learn from what has been done in the rest of the world and leapfrog them?

 

Change Focus from Cost to Value via Patient Outcomes!

I’m a TED fan, if you are not aware of TED.com you need to be! To whet your appetite invest under 13 minutes to watch this lecture, here.  Stefan Larsson, (not to be confused with Stieg although, some parallels may exist with the Millennium Series!), describes the reasoning behind the ICHOM initiative, (ichom.org), who according to it’s site:
“The International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) is a non-profit organization founded by three esteemed institutions with the purpose to transform health care systems worldwide by measuring and reporting patient outcomes in a standardized way.”

Here is the simple concept:

The problem is that we have been measuring the cost and using that as the metric how do you gain a measurement of the ‘outcomes’? That is the role of ICHOM, to measure the outcomes and create the benchmarks as well as find best practices. (If you didn’t watch the lecture he gives examples in hip replacement and prostate surgery.)

The key message is that wherever there has been a focus on improving patient outcomes the costs have dramatically dropped, not too much of a surprise there! I’m guessing that your immediate reaction is, ‘That is all good but who is going to do all this data collection work?’ Interesting is their answer is to use the data that should already exist in patient records as well as involve the patient themselves, reuse and distribution of workloads.

I only have one question, if we have been benchmarking in enterprises for decades, how come this is a new concept in healthcare?  There are numerous benchmarking organisations in various sectors who study a multitude of issues and collect data and publish the benchmarks for these aspect.

I think the answer is simple, in healthcare it’s not that easy!  In commercial organisations there are a relatively small set of quantitative ‘variables’, and in the most they revolve around PROFIT! This may include derivative measurements of cost/efficiency/productivity. However in healthcare the inputs are both numerous and not always quantitative, but today that is no longer a barrier.

Love it or hate it, the ‘Big Data’ revolution taking place has produced technologies and methodologies to compute with ‘subjective’ data! Now measuring patient outcomes and the factors that affect it can be mechanised and thus reasoned over to improve the ‘value’ within our healthcare system.

Now while Australia is participating in ICHOM’s work and I wonder how much impact their results will have on our system as a whole?

Can Technology Transform Healthcare?

How many times in your life do you have an opportunity to make a real difference? I think I have one of those!  EMC has asked me to look at how we can help transform healthcare with the technologies we create and way our customers innovate with them.

Why do I think it’s such a massive opportunity? Because all the elements are there, an urgent requirement, existing proven solutions and a direction that is compelling.

The Urgent Need
There are many forces driving a structural change, from individual’s demands, to the availability of skills, etc. But let me just paint the dire financial picture. Over the last decade in Australia, the growth in healthcare spending has been about double GDP growth.  If GDP is an indication of the tax base, then more and more of government spending is required for healthcare. Now add in the fact that the majority of health costs occur in the latter stages of life, these costs are going to grow faster in the future as the baby-boomers push the population age up! There is a problem today and the diagnosis is bad, this is an unsustainable situation, something has to change!

Existing proven Solutions
I believe that the answer is in transforming the system using technology, (no surprise to anyone who reads my blog.) Let me outline what I see as the major trends and how technology is vital to these:

–          From Hospital to Home.
My father was a radiologist and he used to say ‘Don’t go to hospital –more people die there than anywhere else!’ Although if you study the statistics, hospitals are becoming more dangerous places as more people contact new diseases and complications due to their stays. The point I want to make is that this method of care is like a mainframe, a time shared resource that you have to go to, but is this the optimal model? In computing terms we are moving to the second generation after this model due to better utilisation, more efficient and lower costs of computing. Surely healthcare infrastructure must transform away from this mainframe model as well?

–          From Consultation for Collaboration
When I grew up we had a family doctor, and he was almost part of the family. He knew my grandfather, (also a doctor), and knew me from the moment I was born until I left the country, I don’t think I saw another doctor! He knew everything about me, not just my medical history, but my lifestyle – (rugby injuries), my neighbourhood, (lived a couple of blocks away). Today, especially as you age, the number of clinicians a person consults with is growing, while there is little to no collaboration between these specialists.

More fascinating, (as I grew up in a radiological darkroom), is that although all x-rays are taken digitally, the patient invariably walks out with a film in their hand! Surely healthcare information must be accessible, shareable, and persistent?

The Future of Healthcare or “From Prognosis to Prevention”

Today healthcare diagnoses and treats, tomorrow we will analyse and avoid! The most promising outcome of technological advancement, as well as the most fascinating, is to truly understand how our bodies truly function and from this knowledge be able to avoid getting sick and to keep us strong all through our lifetime.  I was confused, I thought the practice of medicine was a science, however today for the most part it’s an art. But as we gain an understanding from a genetic and molecular level how the body works, the practice becomes a science, a science of ‘wellness’!

The only issue with this is the magnitude of the data we are dealing with, we are simply drowning in data. The massive amount of research data that is published on a daily basis is way beyond the practitioners capability to ingest and so diagnoses are made that are not based on full knowledge. For the individual, we are creating ever increasing amounts of data from wearable technologies to the tsunami of sensor data. Surely gaining meaningful use from all this data is the key to transforming the quality of the healthcare system?

I invite you to join me on this journey, to share your thoughts and let’s make a difference together!

My Big Data Journey – Where’s the Data? or Can Australia be innovative without open data?

In the last post I discussed the basics of getting practical Big Data experience. Now armed with some tools I needed some data to work on!

Well I mentioned Kaggle.com last time and it has lots of data you can use, including data form the Titanic if you want some fun! They even teach you how to sample the dataset, in order to have ‘fresh’ data to test you methods/models/algorithms against. But I wanted to play with live data… so before we begin who is the guy in the picture?  Couple of hints: He ran one of the biggest of Big Data Projects ever. He got some guy elected.

 His name is Harper Reed and he was the CTO of the “Obama for America” campaign. (That was Obama’s second election!) Some of you might have seen him, as he was in Australia last year doing the speaking circuit thing. However, before the Obama campaign, Harper was the CTO of Threadless in Chicago, (a story is for another time), and living in Chicago he did a few interesting things. Like hack into their transit authority and make their bus data available! (http://ctabustracker.com). Which you can use to get the position data of the busses traveling around Chicago right now! And while you are ‘in Chicago’ you might want to see where the city spends its money, (http://www.citypayments.org). (Some ‘goofy’ payments highlighted on the site!)  And I even found their food health inspection data, so if you are ever visiting and want to see where not to eat, this is a goldmine of information.

 So in awe of the access to data in the US, I wondered if I could get some more interesting data closer to home, so I started with transport. I did find a couple of interesting things. Firstly, I take the train to work fairly often and use an app called TripView, which shows me the train timetable. I noticed last year that they started showing on-time running and delays in realtime, so I guessed the data feed must be out there somewhere.

 My search revealed that it seems like only a few organisations have been granted access to their API, but in this open and connected world is that right? If you think that data access to public data should be made open you can vote by signing this petition, (here), to get the links opened up!  The irony here is that in this new data driven and connected world is that there are always people out there who will find a way, and some people have. They have accessed the interface between the mobile app and their data sources… I lost interest but if you would like to go further have a look here. To me the interesting point is old vs. new thinking. People living in, what IDC calls Platform 2, (client/server), while the world is moving to the social, mobile and big data world of Platform 3!

 Moving on, (sorry), I did find that the old RTA, (now the new RMS), has granted access to data, such as travel times on the old F3, (now the M1), from Sydney to Newcastle. (Which goes to prove that you can change the name, but the traffic nightmare remains!) Their site livetraffic.rta.nsw.gov.au offers data in all sorts of forms including an API which you can access for the cost of your e-mail address.

 There are other sources such as data.gov.au.. but as I’m past my self-imposed word limit, so we won’t go there. In summary, in Australia some data is out there in a useful form, but so much is not open, and without open data how can Australia become an innovative country in today’s world?

My Big Data Journey – The Basics!

It is All Out There!
Oh wow! There is so much out there to help you get going in Big Data… it’s almost a Big Data problem in itself.

My first step was to brush up on my programming/language skills, since it’s been years since I’ve tried to seriously write any code. I’d been playing around with Python for a little while so I naively Googled “Python for Big Data” and only got 29.4 million hits… so I took a course from http://www.coursera.org to sharpen my Python skills, then followed a Python for Big Data tutorial given via YouTube and I was almost ready to go!

Lastly to get some practical experience I dropped by kaggle.com, signed up and went through a couple of their tutorials, with datasets and advice. Now I’m not a data scientist, but I do have taste of what they are up against in a practical sense.
You Don’t Need to Know The Math!
This will probably get me into trouble! However, I suggest that you don’t need to know how the algorithms work, you just need to know what they do! If you are not a Python person, then you need to know that there are a myriad of libraries available, (mostly for free), which provide a rich set of functions to perform data-analysis. So, the logic to run the algorithm is developed and is being improved by the community, all you need to do is understand how to use the code and what it does!!

For example let’s say you have two sets of numbers and you want to see if they are related, i.e if there is a correlation between them. So have a look at wiki, (here), and you discover there are several mathematical way to find the correlation depending on the type of relationship between the numbers, (linear, exponential, etc). Now if you want to perform a Pearsons’s coefficient calculation, there is Python library that gives you that, or you decide to use one of the Rank coefficient.. then like wise just a different call!

The tools are all there and everyone can use them, fairly simply… like woodwork! However, a skilled carpenter will produce a far superior product by selecting the correct tools and applying them with their past experience, superior knowledge and skills, as well as the insights they gain looking at the raw materials! Similarly that is what distinguishes me, (the hacker), from a Data Scientist!

Next stepping up from the basics…

Don’t Shout I’m Back – My Big Data, Social and Mobile Holiday

After committing to this blog and posting just two posts, I went silent. We’ll I’ve been on holiday, two weeks of beach, reading and the Australian Open… all ready for the year to come!
Do you ever stop and think about how different life is now compared to the ‘way it used to be’. Let’s just compare my two weeks of to just 15 years ago. How the nature of data, information and access is changing the way we live!
To start we decided rather late in the piece to go away, being peak season we were expecting availability to be scarce and prices to be extortionist. 15 years ago, (then), my wife would have taken to the phones and after several hours we would have been in a position to make a decision, in this case within 15 minutes we reviewed the options and had a booking with the deposit paid within 20! So welcome to the age of the Internet… but that is not that interesting. What was interesting, (and unfortunate for the vendor), is that we could see this particular set of units did not have a high occupancy and negotiated a much ‘fairer’ price. Sometimes we ignore the price transparency that we enjoy today!
I read a great deal but it’s all ‘work’ related, so I’m lost when it comes to what’s worth reading for entertainment. For me sitting on a beach is about being fully covered and protected while reading. (For people who don’t know me, I’m the kind of person who burns, I don’t tan.) In the past this would mean getting recommendations from friends and an extended trip to the book store/ newsagent to find stuff to read… now it was a quick ‘trip’ to Amazon books. After selecting one book… the recommendation engine suggested a few others, which also got loaded onto the Kindle. Once again nothing new here, but sitting on the beach I was expecting to be the only nerd, however as I scanned the beach at least 80% of the people reading were using a device, rather than filling pages with sand!
In the past I’ve managed to watch the major games of the Australian Open, but this year I got to watch the championship build through the two weeks, a totally different experience. It seems to me like the first week are the warm-up matches for the top players. However, as they move into the second week there is a perceivable shift in play. Now, for better or worse it seems like tennis is moving to look more like baseball, heavy heavy statistics! You will notice on TV every few games the commentators are throwing some fact and stat at you. However if you went multi-screen and also participated in the online experience you could get overwhelmed with the information available.
I’ve discussed the ‘slamtracker’ that Tennis Australia has on their website that tracks the way the opponents are playing and how they are achieving their ‘key play objectives’. The idea is that each player has a certain style of play and as such to beat them you have to adapt your style to overcome their strengths and exploit their weaker side. (For example Nadal served almost exclusively to Federer’s backhand!) Now they have added a social monitoring as well, to me more for interest than predicting the outcome of the game. So while the game is being played you can not only see all the statistics in-front of you, you can see how well they are sticking to a winning game strategy and see what people are thinking. Like the massive drop in attitude towards Nadal as he left the court during the final, and expressed with the boos from the crowd when he got back!
All in all…Tennis Australia today is where Social, Mobile and Big Data come together in one place!
So sitting on the beach, reading my kindle with an eye on the tennis… did mean a beach holiday was very different to what I recall just 15 years ago!

The Future of I.T. – This is IT!

In the past four blog posts I’ve been discussing the individual trends of Social, Mobile and Big Data. To save you time if you haven’t read them I argued that the underlying value of each of these trends are:
–          Social’s value is tapping into the community or crowd
–          Mobile’s value is in the fact that everyone and everything is going to be connected.
–          Big Data’s value is in understanding what the data has to tell us.

Now I gave examples how each of these trends have been used by companies and people to change the way that they do things. These niche applications are very specific to an organisation or person, however what everyone wants to know are the benefits that are applicable to most organisations.

What I’ve found is that the benefits multiply when you look for applications at the intersections of these trends.

Social meets Mobile

When the crowd is connected it revolutionises engagement, giving rise to new support models, new way to achieve customer intimacy, new merchandizing methods and new ways industries.

Many organisations are facilitating the service of their products by the crowd. Look at any technology company and you will find a ‘discussion forum’ and or a connection between their products and the crowd. Crowd sources customer service is becoming the norm for the IT industry and its improving customer satisfaction. Not only does the crowd not involve a call centre and a level one script but it also offers real-world advise on best practices!

I took up cycling about two years ago, and to keep motivated I used an app called Strava. At the time I spoke about how this application that tracks people riding and allows them to virtually ride with others, as well as compete against them gave a new dimension to the cold mornings out. Since then there have been a flurry of other initiatives where communities have connected to each other to change the nature of interactions. Everyone knows about garage sales but today the largest garage sale of all eBay has gone way beyond the local neighbourhood as well as past just second had stuff. Craft markets are being replaced by http://www.etsy.com and even borrowing the neighbour’s car is now being put online with http://www.buzzcar.com or  http://www.easycar.com where you can rent your neighbours car in  peer-to-peer rental system.

Big Data meets a Connected World

The ability to augment the human with data can dramatically alter any interaction and any decision. Also understanding what ‘things’ are telling us could improve reliability, performance and efficiency.

Although Google Glass is getting a reputation to be the “nerd’iest” thing on the planet, think about the concept of providing information to you as you do about your normal daily activities. For example you look at an item in a shop and can instantly get the details of the item, the reviews of others and comparative pricing, won’t that change your shopping experience?

Is there information in your organisation that would help someone make a better decision, improve their service to a customer, I’m sure the answer is yes. The issue is getting the relevant information to the relevant person at the relevant time! So we need to start thinking if you would like a side of data with that.

Secondly, in this complex technological world how much better could our systems perform if we understood exactly what was going on. For example: EMC runs a relatively large e-mail set-up to support 60 000 odd users. This single, complex system does have a lot of moving parts and as such does suffer issues that affect users. EMC undertook a project to capture the logs and information from the e-mail system and the infrastructure it runs on and then correlate this to ‘failures’ as reported to the helpdesk. Now EMC can predict when a situation is forming which is likely to affect users, and these can be averted by taking action.

The information is out there, we just have to understand what it is saying.

Crowd meets Big Data

Understanding that the crowd is saying and where they are going is key to anyone producing or servicing people!

A fun example is eHarmony.com, a dating site that took a ‘big data’ route to differentiating itself. I believe they have about 500 questions that they ask of people to enable them to match couples up. According to their entry on Wikipeadia, (here), their couples have a better ‘quality score’ than the average and twice as likely to report their marriages as ‘extremely happy’. (Their stats.)

Well do I need to say more if there is some evidence that it works in a subject as complex as relationships and love?

Understanding the social trends leads to a predictive enterprise, revolutionises the development of new products and services as well as gives a new dimension to branding and marketing.

To summarise, if you are looking to drive meaningful change to your organisation all you have to do is leverage the Internet of Everything, tap into the power of the crowd and understand what the data is telling you!