Informatica Announces Data Integration Marketplace
Like Salesforce’s AppExchange for cloud computing, the idea behind the data integration marketplace is to enable its large community of developers and partners to share information and products such as mapplets, vertical solutions and connectors.
“This is a place where we can bring together the 52,000 developers in our community and allow them to showcase their wares,” said Tony Young, CIO at Informatica.
To ensure quality control, initially Informatica will be vetting what goes onto the marketplace to check code is viable. But once Marketplace is more established, it hopes to introduce certification programme and to adopt a peer review process with a start rating calibrating the success of the product and any documentation that goes with it.
“One of the unique things we’re doing is creating a marketplace for buyers to post what they want from sellers, such as a connection to an innocuous system that is not readily used by many people. People can go out and work on that for you,” said Young.
It is also an open platform and the products traded may not specifically be related to Informatica. The company is not aiming to make money from the venture, but hopes that creating an open platform for discussion among customers, partners and developers will provide useful feedback on future product directions and strategy.
The beta version is up and running now.
This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.
Systech’s expertise in Informatica covers a variety of databases and integration software enabling us to deliver Informatica solutions across different platforms.
View Systech’s Informatica Technology Practice
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Healthcare IT is Transforming from Supporting Administrative Processes to Supporting Patient Care, Survey Says
Inadequate focus on reliable IT infrastructures will hobble healthcare organizations’ efforts to automate critical operations to improve patient care while cutting costs, according to a commissioned study of 102 U.S. healthcare IT professionals conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Stratus Technologies. Server Availability Trends in the Time of Electronic Health Records: What the Move to Paperless Medical Records Means for Server Reliability finds that, despite debate on the rate of growth or barriers to adoption, EHRs are growing and here to stay. This is transforming the role of IT — and the IT organization — from supporting administrative processes to supporting patient care.
Policy makers, patient advocates and healthcare companies themselves agree that electronic patient records and care management systems will improve treatment by reducing error rates and costly duplication. A focus on front-end applications and the handheld devices they run on, however, has overshadowed the server and network layers of the IT infrastructure, where the critical data processing and retrieval will occur, the study said. Without highly reliable server infrastructures, patient information systems are likely to perform poorly and lead to frustrated medical personnel, lower quality care and lost revenues.
Although healthcare IT professionals are aware of their needs at the server and network levels, they face scant financial and staff resources for meeting them. “Healthcare IT professionals face significant challenges in maintaining server availability,” according to the study’s findings. “And the impact on the delivery of care and operations of the hospital or physician practice were significant, ranging from overtaxed and disgruntled medical staff to delays in patient care. Availability has become an imperative, yet health care IT professionals struggle to meet the challenge,” the study said.
The survey recommends a three-pronged strategy for developing a durable, reliable server infrastructure:
• Assess your entire server portfolio and identify critical and key points of failure that impact care. Identify the function and the process role of each server and assign a rating to the impact of a failure.
• Develop a strategy for server availability around a solid set of tools that minimize the cost impact.
• Align with a vendor that understands health care’s requirements for availability. Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents felt that having a server vendor that understood the health care sector’s unique needs was a critically important factor to them.
“Between the focus on health care at the national level and the federal funds available, there may never be a better time for healthcare organizations to convert to electronic healthcare records,” said Karen Ramirez, Stratus healthcare sales executive. “They have a lot of anxiety about how to do it correctly and within their means. With the right combination of forethought, planning and product selection, healthcare IT can provide the reliability and performance that patient healthcare applications need to deliver cost savings and better quality care.”
This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.
Systech’s Healthcare Analytics solution helps integrate patient data across the enterprise and makes it available at the point-of-service to help providers improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes – the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.
View various applications and benefits of Healthcare Analytics developed at Systech.
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Gartner Identifies Four Information Management Roles IT Departments Need to Remain Effective for 2010
Gartner, Inc. has identified four information-management roles that IT departments need to establish and recruit from outside the IT team in a major trend that will affect both IT and business.
“Over the next two years, business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation will outstrip the supply of qualified people to fulfill job roles and as result traditional IT tasks are moving outside the IT department,” said Debra Logan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The future of IT lies outside the IT department. Increasingly CIOs are coming from “the business” and “users” are taking control of their own information delivery infrastructure.” By the end of 2010, Gartner predicts that 40 percent of people who report into IT in a matrixed fashion or directly will have substantial business and non-IT experience.
Organizations need staff with different skills from the ones they were originally hired for. These are not IT people as organizations know them. “Staying relevant in this changing environment will require a new way of thinking about organizational models and staffing in IT projects,” added Ms Logan. The four job roles that IT will need to support within the business or within IT are:
Legal and IT Hybrids
Gartner predicts that 20 percent of Global 2000 companies will add the role of litigation support manager by 2010, up from less than 5 percent in 2005. Legal and IT hybrids create policies and schedules, help design and execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between legal and IT departments. Organizations can fulfill the role by retraining security professionals in law or giving legal professionals some IT training.
“IT leaders with responsibility for information management have been in a stalemate for more than five years over what to do about legacy information, how long information should be kept, and what the legal precedent is for doing so,” said Ms Logan. “The lawyers won’t tell companies what to do, but they won’t listen to anyone but other lawyers. The records managers want to implement retention schedules as they did in the paper world, and IT departments just want someone to tell them what to do with all the e-mail that is bringing their exchange servers to their knees and all the personal folders clogging the storage devices.”
Digital Archivists
Digital archivists will be required to appraise arrange and preserve digital records for legal and regulatory purposes. Gartner expects around 15 percent of companies to add a digital-archivist role by 2012 compared with fewer than 1 percent in 2009. Suitable candidates can be found in library and information science (LIS) schools or existing employees nearing the end of their careers.
“Organizations typically have vast quantities of records, which require specialist expertise to access, appraise and preserve,” said Ms Logan. “This isn’t a job for conscientious users to perform if they have time; it requires training and expertise. If you have never heard of persistent uniform resource locators (PURLs), don’t know what PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) is and are unaware that there are reasons why Portable Document Format (PDF) is not a suitable preservation format for e-mail, you need a digital curator.”
Business Information Managers
Twenty percent of business managers rated the information that they get from IT as poor, according to the Gartner Business Pulse survey conducted from June through August 2009*. “Information management has never been an explicit job role: IT manages the technology, business manages the domain, but who manages the information?” said Ms Logan. “Companies have allowed a huge gap to open up, and consequently, everyone has been the manager of their own information.”
There will be an increasing trend to combine business and information management expertise in a single role, carried out by a single person, rather than a “business and IT partnership” with two people, two hierarchies and two sets of reporting relationships. One company already taking this approach achieved all its objectives including a cost reduction for the department of 10 percent in the first year. Gartner expects 20 percent of companies to employ business information managers by 2013, compared with 5 percent in 2009.
Enterprise Information Architects
Within IT itself, enterprise information architects will be required to create taxonomies, document templates and data models. Gartner has observed several additional roles within the title of information architect, which has developed to include a mix of skills to enable both structured and unstructured content to be managed effectively. In some cases, the same person may fill more than one information architecture role, such as business-level information architect, data-integration architect, application-oriented information architect and content-oriented information architect. All these roles focus on adding structure and context to data so that the data can be leveraged to increase its value and maximise efficiency and reuse.
“Despite difficult economic conditions and disruptive technology, business and demographic trends, IT organizations have not changed their priorities or behaviors,” said Ms Logan. “If IT responds the way it always has, IT operations face obsolescence. The role of technology will now be to augment human contributions, rather than automate them. The only way to manage information better is to manage information better with people.”
This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.
