OS/2 Celebrates 25 Years

Harry McCracken’s story (see 25 Years of IBM’s OS/2: The Strange Days and Surprising Afterlife of a Legendary Operating System) about OS/2 brought back a lot of memories. Seeing my picture in PC World magazine made me feel old — who is that young man? Bill Gates and I were both wearing purple shirts, but that was the only thing we had in common. OS/2 was a great product, but it failed in the end for many reasons that Harry described. From my perspective, the main thing that could have upped the odds for OS/2 would have been if we had tightly integrated the IBM hardware, software, and services that IBM had at the time. Unfortunately, there was a feeling of independence in the various divisions of the company; the PC Company, the Personal Sofware Products Division of which I was the vice president for marketing, the IBM Global Network, the amazing National Service Division of which I earlier was vice president for service business, the various industry vertical and marketing organizations of IBM, and the financial resources to put it all together.

But, we did not put it all together. The Apple iPad and Mac are successful because Apple put it all together so that “it just works”. IBM had a similar potential with OS/2. Three researchers developed a Web browser called the Web Explorer. It was the best Web browser at the time. The ThinkPad had just been introduced a year earlier. IBM was the only vendor that could offer a PC with an operating system, a suite of Internet tools for surfing, email, and news reading, plus the IBM Global Network — all bundled on a ThinkPad. That was 1994 and IBM had it all and no other vendor was even close. Unfortunately, IBM, at the time, wanted each division to stand on its own. The PC division believed they could sell more PCs if they put Windows on them instead of OS/2. The OS/2 team wanted to make their software work with all the industry software, but the Lotus division wanted just their products on the PC. The industry vertical groups wanted to sell whatever kind of PC the customer wanted, IBM or others. The service division wanted to service any brand and give-up the exclusivity of great IBM service. While Apple had one brand, IBM had multiple brands, each with its own advertising agency, that did not leverage the strength of one of the greatest brands of all times — IBM.  When Lou Gerstner took control, the company came back together again, but unfortunately, it was too late for OS/2. If you like technology history, read Harry’s story. He did a great job in pulling it together. In my basement, I have a collection of OS/2 hats on the wall. My grandchildren ask me, “Pop-pop, what is OS/2?”

Tags: IBM, IBM Global Network, IGN, internet, john patrick, os/2, ThinkPad, Web Explorer

Speech at SIIA

It was a privilege to be a speaker at the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) conference in New York on January 25. The subject of the speech was The Future of the Internet but I included an emphasis on impact to healthcare and publishing. The conference was attended by executives from the publishing and software industries. I do not know why the video was captured in five segments, but until I get a consolidated version, the links are below. The slides were on my iPad and the video doesn’t show the screen the audience was looking at. If you want to see the slides, they are here.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Tags: future, health, Healthcare, hospital, internet, john patrick, medicine, music, publisher, siia, technology

Big Data

The storage capacities of laptop and desktop computers has been growing rapidly, but the growth may not be fast enough. According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Perhaps quintillions of bytes are not meaningful to most of us, but it is the growth rate that is staggering — 90% of all the data in the world has been created in the last two years. Where does all the data come from? Data comes from everywhere: from sensors used to gather climate information, physiological readings taken 1,000 times per second from a patient, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and cell phone GPS coordinates to name just a few. Collectively, the phenomenon is called “big data”. (See  IBM Big data and information integration for smarter computing).

Note: Data is plural. The singular term is datum. Should we say data is or data are? There are many views on which is right.

 IBM describes big data as spanning three dimensions: Variety, Velocity and Volume.  Variety refers to the fact that big data extends beyond structured data like we might find in a spread sheet. It includes unstructured data such as text documents, email, audio and video recordings, click streams from the web, log files that record financial and business transactions, and much more. Velocity of data refers to the fact that data can be time-sensitive such as bid and ask data in a financial market or physiological data that affect the lives of patients. In these cases, historical data is interesting but real-time data is critical. The third parameter is volume. IBM says that big data comes in one size: large. Organizations are flooded with data — terabytes, petabytes, or even yottabytes.

Big data is a challenge in various technical ways, but more importantly, it is an opportunity to find insight in new and emerging types of data and to answer questions that, in the past, were not possible to analyze effectively. Data that has been hidden can be surfaced and acted upon. The result can be a more agile organization or in the case of health care, better outcomes for patients.  Picture a hospital neonatal environment where a plethora of medical monitors connected to babies are used to alert hospital staff to potential health problems before patients develop clinical signs of infection or other issues. There are breakthroughs on the horizon for how this will be done. Today the instrumentation generates huge amounts of information — up to 1,000 readings per second — which is summarized into one reading every 30 to 60 minutes. The information is stored for up to 72 hours and is then discarded. If the stream of data could be captured, stored and analyzed in real-time there could be a huge opportunity to improve the quality of care for special-care babies.

The Hospital for Sick Children in Ontario, Canada developed such a vision and is acted on it. Dr. Carolyn McGregor, Canada research chair in health informatics at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology visited researchers at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center who are working on a new stream-computing platform to support healthcare analytics. A three-way collaboration was established, with each group bringing a unique perspective — the hospital focus on patient care, the university’s ideas for using the data stream, and IBM providing the advanced analysis software and information technology expertise needed to turn the vision into reality. The result of the collaboration was Project Artemis which pairs IBM scientists with clinicians and`researchers to explore how emerging technologies can solve real-world business problems, in this case developing a highly flexible platform that aims to help physicians make better, faster decisions regarding patient care for a wide range of conditions. At the Children’s hospital the focus is real-time detection of the onset of nosocomial infection (often called hospital-acquired infection). Regulatory, ethical, privacy, and safety issues were addressed and then two infant beds were instrumented and connected to the system for data collection. The team then created an algorithm that deciphered the streaming data. By establishing the impact of moving a baby or changing its diaper, those things can be filtered out to help spot the telltale signs of nosocomial infection.

Dr. Andrew James, staff neonatologist, at the Hospital for Sick Children is optimistic that as they learn more they will be able to account for variations in individual patients and eventually be able to integrate data inputs such as lab results and observational notes. In the future, any condition that can be detected through subtle changes in the underlying data streams can be the target of the system’s early-warning capabilities. It is likely that sensors attached to or even implanted in the body will allow monitoring of important conditions from home or anywhere. Big data has the potential to improve the health of patients whever they may be.

Other healthcare-related stories on patrickWeb

Tags: analytics, big data, health, Healthcare, hospital, IBM, monitoring, neonatal

Atoms by the Dozen

IBM has just made a huge advance in atomic-scale magnetic memory. The MacBook I am typing this story on stores one bit of data in about 1 million atoms. With IBM’s new atomic-scale magnetic memory, 12 is the new million. The nanotechnology breakthrough will lead to storage that is 100 times more dense than today’s hard disk drives. IBM said that an entire music and movie collection could fit on a charm-sized pendant you wear around your neck. Hard drives have continually improved in storage and cost, but the current technology is running into physical limitations. Scientists at IBM Research have been working  at the atomic scale for decades, but only recently has it advanced to the point that it looks like their work will produce the ultimate memory chips of the future. Operating at incredibly cold temperatures, the IBM researchers have been able to manipulate 12 atoms into what they describe as a stable magnetic storage unit. Once a manufacturing technique is devised, putting many millions of atoms together will result in a highly energy-efficient, no-moving-parts, storage system capable of changing the way we think of information. For many people, today’s storage capacity is more than adequate, but the deluge of data from video, GPS locations, sensors, and social media interactions will demand significantly more storage capacity in the near future.  IBM says that everyday we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. The rate of increasing data creation is so fast that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

 Smaller Magnetic Materials Push Boundaries of Nanotechnology – from the New York Times
 YouTube video of IBM physicist explaining the new breakthrough

Tags: antiferromagnetic, atom, IBM, nano, nanotechnology, research

Why You Should Embrace Your Company’s Heretics

CNNMoney’s Fortune published a story last week called Why You Should Embrace Your Company’s Heretics. The story was written by Polly LaBarre. I have not talked to Polly for ten years but we did attended a number of the same conferences back then. This new story described my evangelism of the Internet and she said some complimentary things. The story is accurate, but I never thought of myself as a heretic. One fellow board member who read the story sent me a note saying he thought heretics were burned at the stake. Back in 2006, Polly and Bill Taylor, founding editor of Fast Company Magazine, wrote a book called Mavericks at Work where they described 50 “mavericks”. I was one of them, but had not yet been promoted or demoted (not sure which it would be) to “heretic”. I was labeled with the term “rebel” by Gary Hamel in his Waking Up IBM: How a Gang of Unlikely Rebels Transformed Big Blue that appeared in the Harvard Business Review in April 2001. A few months before that, Fast Company magazine published an interview I did with Polly where we talked about technology futures (see Think Ahead: John Patrick). The only heretic I can think of is ”Homer the Heretic” — an episode of The Simpsons‘, which originally aired in 1992.

Tags: CNNMoney, Fast Company, Fortune, Fortune Magazine, Harvard Business Review, heretic, IBM, john patrick

IBM at 100 – A Day of Nostalgia and Optimism

I was not exactly sure what to expect when I arrived at the world famous T. J. Watson Research Center at IBM last week. I have been there many times over the years but never to a birthday party. I walked in to the arrival tent where light refreshments were being served and the crowd of 350 invited guests began to build. One of the first people I saw was Allen Krowe. Allen had been CFO of IBM and then Vice Chairman of Texaco. I was his assistant back in 1981. I remember the day that he turned 50 years old and thinking that was very advanced. That was 30 years ago and NOW I am 15 years older than he was then. Then I saw Spike Beitzel. Spike had been a sales manager in Philadelphia for IBM’s insurance industry customers, the same position that I held some years later. Spike is a pilot, as was Allen, and many other senior IBM executives, including Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Spike is 83 and still flies his own airplane. It was nice to talk about aviation. It was a privilege to say hello to three IBM CEOs — John Akers, Lou Gerstner, and Sam Palmisano. There were four current and former heads of IBM Research there. One of them was Ralph Gomory. I am not sure how old Ralph is but he got his PhD in mathematics from Princeton in 1954. Whenb he retired from IBM in 1989 he became president of the Sloan Foundation. The pattern became clear — this was not just a birthday party for IBM; it was an alumni reunion for executives that worked for IBM over the past fifty years. Then I ran into the former heads of IBM Japn, IBM China, IBM Italy, IBM Brazil, and various other parts of IBM from around the world. Former Chairman Thomas J. Watson, Jr., said in 1957 that IBM “is a company of human beings, not machines; personalities, not products; people, not real estate.” That observation was true long before 1957 — and it remains so today. Although every IBMer makes a difference, there is a list of IBM Builders that were the pioneers who helped to fashion the IBM of the 21st century. Most of them were were among those in the tent; it was humbling to be in their midst and a thrill to shake their hands. Everyone had a smile on their face. It was a happy and nostalgic day that none of us will ever forget.

The main event took place in a really big tent. There were 2,000 members of IBM Research in attendance. During the opening ceremonies Sam Palmisano asked the thirty members of the Watson family in attendance to stand; everyone appreciated the heritage of the company. The family must have been proud to hear about Watson, the advanced Q&A system that triumphed at Jeopardy, and will surely change the way medicine is practiced as it transforms anecdotal medicine to personalized, evidence-based medicine. The program included some excellent videos about the past, present, and future of IBM. Senior VP Jon Iwata interviewed three journalists, Kevin Maney, Steve Hamm and Jeffrey O’Brien about the research they had done to write their new book about IBM called Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company. I have known Kevin for quite a few years. When he quoted someone in his columns at USA Today, you always knew that he would not use information out of context. Steve Hamm wrote the story about my home when he was at BusinessWeek. He now works for IBM. It was an alumni event with journalists too! Another panel with Senior VP John Kelly focused on IBM research efforts around the world, in particular about IBM’s advanced work on environmental and healthcare initiatives. Sam and senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy Ginni Rometty painted a rosy picture of IBM’s future.  IBM also cares about the future of others. As part of its Celebration of Service, 300,000 IBMers around the world — nearly three quarters of its global workforce — volunteeried in more than 5,000 projects in 120 countries, helping millions in need. Since the beginning of the year, IBMers, retirees and their families have donated more than 2.5 million hours of service to communities worldwide. A lot of conofidence was exuded that another 100 years of innovation and growth are underway.

Tags: akers, Aviation, beitzel, evidence based medicine, gerstner, gomory, Healthcare, IBM, IBM Research, kevin maney, krowe, palmisano, personalized medicine, research, rometty, steve hamm, supercomputing, watson, yorktown

Breakfast with Nick

If you are interested in getting some great insight about technology and innovation, head up to the new Matrix Conference Center on Tuesday morning for a breakfast with Nick Donofrio. Nick is an IBM Fellow Emeritus and a terrific speaker. I am out of town through Tuesday or I would surely be there. The “Networking Breakfast’ has been organized by United Way’s Emerging Leaders Group and Nick’s talk is titled Leadership in the Marketplace. Details below.

April 19th l 7:30 am
The Matrix Conference Center
39 Old Ridgebury Road Danbury, CT
$25 per person
RSVP to: Stacy Schulman at (203) 792-5330 ext 247 or via email at sschulman@uwwesternct.org
Proceeds of the event support educational initiatives of United Way of Western Connecticut.

Tags: donofrio, IBM, innovation, matrix center

Batteries that Breath and Holographic Phone Calls

For many years IBM developed a ten year outlook every year and proudly presented it to executives inside and outside of the company. The TYO was a high-level glimpse into the future of technology. About ten years ago the TYO was stopped because the pace of technology evolution had reached the stage where the future that far out became very difficult to predict. As Yogi Berra said, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” Not that IBM is any less focused on creating the future. The company earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM’s 2008 patent issuances exceed those of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google — combined. IBM now issues a five-year forecast annually of five specific technology shifts that 3,000 of its researchers see coming. The International Business Times reported briefly on IBM’s “Next Five in Five” list of five innovations expected over the next five years.

3-D images will not be limited to action movies on TV. A cell-phone call from a friend may be accompanied by a 3-D image of your friend. Videoconferencing is already gaining a lot of traction but when they can be conducted through holographic cameras that fit into cell phones, the virtual reality will become much closer to real reality.
Advances in transistors and battery technology will accelerate — potentially allowing electronic devices to function without charging 10 times longer than currently. Today’s lithium-ion batteries could be replaced by batteries “that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal, eliminating a key inhibitor to longer lasting batteries,” IBM said. The amount of energy needed by electronic circuits may be reduced to such a degree that a modest amount of physical motion may create sufficient energy to power them. Wrist watches exist that have no batteries and get their energy from movement of our wrists. Within five years, the same concept may be used to charge mobile phones.
Personalized commutes are another advancement seen by IBM scientists. New mathematical models and predictive analytics technologies will produce the best routes for daily travel. The models will take into consideration the patterns of travelers and various conditions to predict where traffic congestion is going to occur and then give you the fastest and safest route to your destination.
Human beings will also increasingly become “walking sensors,” IBM said. Within five years, sensors in your phone, your car, your wallet plus your texts and tweets will create data that will give scientists a real-time picture of the environment around you. A whole class of ‘citizen scientists’ will emerge using their sensors to create massive data sets for research. The result will be more effective efforts to fight global warming, save endangered species and track invasive plants or animals that threaten ecosystems around the world.
Finally, IBM said, scientists will find better ways to recycle heat and energy from the huge data centers that power the millions of web sites around the world. Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by data centers goes toward cooling air. Most of the heat extracted is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. New technologies, such as novel on-chip water-cooling systems developed by IBM will provide heat for buildings in the winter and air condition them in the summer.

They were not mentioned in IBM’s “Next Five in Five” list, but the company is making large investments in multiple dimensions of healthcare. Breakthroughs are a certainty and technology will play a major role in containing healthcare cost while improving outcomes for patients. Stay tuned at healthdiscussions.net for updates on this topic.

Tags: batteries, data center, energy, green, hologram, holographic, hvac, IBM, research, traffic

Blogging Reflection

My friend Irving commented that he is not so sure about my conclusion in the BioEverything post that the trend toward The Singularity is underway. Irving may be right although the things going on in bioengineering seem to fit the pattern that Ray Kurzweil describes in his book. More on that another time. What got me thinking from Irving’s comment is more about blogging. Now that I have been a student in the doctoral program for a couple of months I can see quite a contrast between scholarly writing with critical thinking and the world of blogging.

In scholarly writing it is important to back your assertions and conclusions with research and to provide a citation for all the reference material that you use. It is also important to think critically about what you read and to not jump to conclusions. Various points of view that you uncover should be compared and contrasted to bring out differences. The goal is to create new knowledge by extending or enhancing what you learn from others.

Blogging is quite a different process. Although it is certainly possible to provide a reference list and citations it is generally a much more informal communications vehicle. A skeptic might call it “winging it”. I am the first to admit that the things I write in my blog are not vetted in any way. The things I say are my opinion. I have many readers who trust me as a source but it is certainly not peer reviewed. An advantage of the blog however is that an author can easily change their mind and express a new opinion as a result of learning or feedback such as was provided by Irving. My book about the Internet took me six months to write. It took the publishing process more than six months to get the book on the shelves of book stores. In the world of Internet technology a lot changes in six months. With the blog as my book follow-on I can write weekly what I have learned and include things that have changed and in some cases caused me to believe something different than what I believed at the time I wrote the book.

The first thing students are advised in the doctoral program is to avoid using Google, Wikipedia, social networking sites, or general purpose websites and instead to use the thousands of journals containing peer reviewed points of view. Fortunately, the university library provides on-line access and search tools to utilize these journals. I completely agree with the university’s point that the easy access and availability of so many search engines can provide an avenue for poor quality work. I also agree with caveat emptor. There is a lot of great information on the web and a lot of not so great and some that is completely fraudulent. The ease of creating and finding information both has risks.

With regard to the peer review process I am not sure it is perfect. Perhaps it is like the jury system. It is not perfect but it is better than the alternatives. Shattell (2010) found that slightly more than 25% of authors found peer reviews to be less than constructive. Editors revealed issues with inconsistency, insufficient feedback to the author, reviewer bias, and disrespectful tone. The Internet has created a more level playing field and it is beginning to have an impact on processes that have previously been considered sacred. I believe the peer review process is critical to the integrity of scholarly learning and to the University of Phoenix Scholar-Practitioner-Leader model but I further believe that the peer-review process will evolve by using the power of the Internet to make the process more inclusive. Dan Cohen at George Mason University (Cohen, 2010, August 23) is one of the advocates for a more open web-based approach to the review of scholarly works. The New York Times article on this subject is enlightening and I am sure there will be significant research done on the points raised in the Times story.

Cohen, P. (2010, August 23, 2010). Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review, New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html

Shattell, M. M., Chinn, P., Thomas, S. P., & Cowling, W. R., III. (2010). Authors’ and editors’ perspectives on peer review quality in three scholarly nursing journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 42(1), 58-65. doi: 10.1111/j.1547-5069.2009.01331.x

Tags: bio-engineering, blogging, e-learning, irving wladawsky, irving wladawsky-berger, Kurzweil, peer review, peer reviewed, singularity, university

Smarter Healthcare

We have a long way to go but things are accelerating in the world of healthcare. Thanks to improved technology and enlightened healthcare administrators, information technology investments are being deployed at a rapid pace and adoption by caregivers is growing. I am especially pleased to see IBM jumping into this arena and leveraging its considerable resources and talents. Not that it is a new area for IBM. A year after I joined the company in 1967 three IBMers saw a big opportunity to provide mainframe outsourcing for hospitals and left to form Shared Medical Systems. SMS went on to become a $billion company with more than 7,500 employees. It was subsequently acquired by Siemens which is one of today’s leading solution providers in healthcare. IBM was a partner and supplier to SMS and is today a strategic partner with Siemens. IBM’s focus has shifted dramatically over the last half-decade. In addition to providing servers, storage, and software, IBM provides highly advanced services. It has supplemented it’s legions of PhD’s in physics, math, and engineering with medical doctors, nurses, and others with clinical experience. The strategy to assist in the transformation to a “smarter planet” approach for healthcare is to engage in deep partnerships in areas that can have high impact. A couple of current examples follow.

IBM and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) are teaming up to bring “smarter” hospital rooms to patients. The system, created by UPMC three years ago, features a system to automatically organize and prioritize the work of nurses and other caregivers.  The IBM SmartRoom uses ultrasound tags to identify health care workers as they walk into a patient’s room, displaying the person’s identity and role on a wall-mounted monitor visible to patients. It also automatically provides various physician, clinician and support staff with the relevant real-time patient information pulled from the electronic medical record, including allergies, vital signs, test results and medications that are due on their monitor. The system also evaluates tasks for each patient and helps determine which tasks should be completed in which order to most effectively and safely provide care needed by the patient. It also alerts the appropriate caregiver by mobile device or when they walk into a patient’s room. Unexpected interruptions — from new physician orders to lengthy discussions with a patient’s family — are factored into the dynamically changing priority list. Using a simple touchscreen interface on a monitor in the patient’s room, a nurse or aide can document the completion of tasks in just a few seconds. The SmartRoom provides real-time links to key clinical systems, including pharmacy and lab services. Patient email, testing schedules, education and other features are also offered through the SmartRoom technology.

In the electronic medical record arena IBM and ActiveHealth Management, an Aetna subsidiary, have announced the Collaborative Care Solution — a low cost, cloud computing based subscription service that gives medical practices, hospitals and states collaborative and analytics technologies for their accountable care and medical home efforts. (These two new approaches are fundamental to the reshaping of how healthcare will be delivered in the months and years ahead). Sharp Community Medical Group in San Diego announced that it will use the new solution. The Sharp network includes over 200 primary care physicians and over 500 specialists who care for more than 165,000 patients in   San Diego county.

The IBM cloud computing approach combines information from electronic medical records, claims, medication and lab data with ActiveHealth’s advanced analytics software so care can be coordinated among teams of physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, aides, therapists and pharmacists. Additionally, the solution provides advanced analytics that help physicians, or entire healthcare organizations, measure their performance against national or hospital quality standards. The solution can also show trends in how patients are responding to treatment for chronic asthma, or adhering to drug regimens and automatically alert doctors to conflicting or missed prescriptions.

John Jenrette, M.D., CEO for Sharp Community Medical Group says, “This is going to revolutionize how we practice medicine. Instead of digging into volumes of paper to coordinate services, we’re going to have that information available at our fingertips. It’s going to make us all more efficient.” Using Collaborative Care, hospitals and medical practices will be able to connect, analyze and share a wide range of clinical and administrative data from disparate systems and sources via a regional health information exchange. The system will automate the measurement, tracking and reporting of clinical quality performance at the patient and practice level using the Active CareTeam, and it will improve patient care through the use of evidence-based, clinical decision support powered by the ActiveHealth CareEngine. The by-product will be a transformation of practices that will assist them in achieving the goals needed to achieve Patient Centered Medical Home status and become Accountable Care Organizations. There are also a range of tools to engage patients in their own care. The Collaborative Care Solution analyzes multiple patient data sources to give doctors actionable decision support on their desktop – highlighting gaps in care, clinical research or potential drug interactions. It also helps doctors see trends in patient populations, for example by showing among 2,000 patients how many have uncontrolled diabetes, or how many women haven’t had their mammography screening, a snapshot they haven’t been able to see before. All of these things combined move us one step further away from anecdotal medicine toward information based medicine. The result will be better outcomes at lower cost.

Tags: accountable care, aco, active careteam, activehealth, careEngine, Healthcare, hospital, medical home, patient centered medical home, patient centric, smart room, upmc