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Final Post
Here it is. The final and most important post. Just kidding, I doubt this will be a groundbreaking post, but alas, it is the 10th and final post.
Today I wanted to talk about the way IS2000 has changed the way I think. I now never look at a business or a website or a database without criticizing it mercilessly. Don’t worry, I also recognize where it does things well. I want to leave this message with a couple companies I think do very well. For one, the Wall Street Journal recently released an article with the best managed companies. These companies according to them, are the best managed in the world and do things in an effective way.
Their names are not exactly unexpected, it includes some of the biggest names on the global market. This should not be a shocker, since the companies that are most successful will likely be the best managed. But I think this holds a valuable lesson.
The companies that are the best managed, the companies that not only think about their products but think about the systems they use to sell, manage, research, and produce these products, are most likely to succeed.
And that is why information scientists are so important. Without well managed information, systems fail. A military operation with bad information fail, a system that cannot manage information well will fail, everything with bad information will fail. It is our job to do the best with that job.
And with that, though it may be a bit of a cop-out, I leave you with the largest companies in the world, and it only takes a minute or two to see these companies do the best at this job.
Thanks for a great semester.
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Criticisms of the Hospital Process
Unfortunately over break, instead of spending time with family or with family and working on assignments, I spent most of it in bed. As someone who rarely gets sick, I was surprised to find myself horribly ill, with the sickness culminating over the weekend.
Even with my mentality of telling everyone to “suck it up” and man up, I found myself awake late at night realizing I needed to take myself to the ER. So, I walked out of my apartment at 1:30 in the morning, and took an uber to the ER.
Now to clarify, this is NOT a critique of the healthcare system or an endorsement of any other. I have insurance I am very satisfied with and have received nothing but reasonable care my entire life.
I tried to let them know I was coming through their non-life-threatening online check-in to avoid a long wait and to give them the courtesy. This was my first problem with their system. One, it informed me that I had life threatening symptoms. So rather than allowing me to check-in, it blacklisted by IP Address and demanded I show up. So even though I now apparently had life-threatening symptoms, I could not inform them I was on the way. Seems like a bit of an issue.
So alas, my uber arrives at the hospital and I walk inside. There were zero signs directing me where to go, but I was able to guess and make my way towards a CA who checked me in. This was not a big issue for me since I was alert albeit very ill, but I could only imagine being someone not so alert and trying to find my way around.
After checking in and giving my insurance information, I was directed to a room where they took my vitals, which I actually thought was efficient since the woman who checked me in was also the one to take my vitals. Then, I waited. The ER was empty, and I waited. Not a few minutes, not ten minutes, not twenty minutes, but well over 35 minutes till a PA came into the room.
The PA himself was great, but I heard him gossiping with the RN for 10+ minutes before he came into the room. There seems to be a little bit of a disconnect in what sort of service the customer (or patient in this case) should be provided.
After the PA recommended tests and chest Xrays I wsas sped through those in a timely manner, and then waited. And waited some more. And heard the doctor in another room gossiping. And waited. And waited. I was a bit too sick to really care enough about saying anything and was just enjoying the topical analgesics they had rubbed onto my throat instead.
All said and done, it was over three hours in the ER before they told me they had no idea what was wrong with me, and just gave me permission to take high doses of NSAID’s and said see you in here later if it doesn’t get better.
Now, my own subjective experience could have been better, yes. But that aside, the inefficiency that was shown by the hospital staff is bad for them! Sure, I was not going to die on the bed and it may have been a slow night, but the bars get out at 2AM and they could very quickly be filled up, making a backlog with the non-critical patients they did have. A 2004 study supports my views, showing that it keeps the ER from becoming over saturated! This other more opinionated piece talks a bit more about patient happiness, though like I said I care less about that and more just about hospitals being run in a way that keeps them more ready for emergency. If they were to have some sort of standards in place regarding how quickly patients need to at the very least get seen and assessed, I could have been in and out in less than 90 minutes, freeing up their staff to be prepared for any other emergencies, and it would have taken ZERO extra work on their part.
Alas, I doubt my personal opinions will be taken to dramatically change a health care system, but one can only hope.
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So many of the topics we discuss in class seem like no-brainers. It makes you wonder, why hasn’t every company done this? We present the topics in class clearly and with the assumption that these are positive topics for businesses to discuss and actions to take. Of course, they are in fact positive. Then we end up at the question? Why don’t businesses implement these all? And if they are “easier” to implement when the company is in the formative ages, why don’t they implement it from the start?
For the sake of relating this blog to the most recently discussed topics in class, lets look at process analytics. The pros of process analytics are quite clear, they help a business maximize their processes and lower time to market, cost, etc. So again, why don’t they all do it?
To answer this, I think of two personal examples. The first, based around the small startup not going about it in the beginning, is my friend who started a computer repair business. When he started it, he simply created a wesbite, advertised on Facebook, put himself in the Yellowpages, and came up with a name for his business. He would drive to people’s homes, pick up their computer or information system equipment, pick up their broken gear while telling them an estimate, and then bring it to his house to work on.
Overtime, this became too unwieldy of a process and he added another employee that was responsible for reaching out and receiving customer requests, picking up the gear, and returning it. This left him able to simply work on the computers.
When he first started, he wasn’t thinking of “maximizing” his efficiency or drawing diagrams and looking at flow charts. He was caught up in simply trying to get paying customers. This is often the biggest problem with startups. When they start out, with exceptions of course, they aren’t thinking forty years down the line, they are thinking of tomorrow, and next week, and next year. They have tangible problems in front of them at that moment in time. They’re more worried about getting a process started, not analyzing one.
Of course, it would be great if my friend had stopped to think about the entire system before he began, but just like so many other startups, he didn’t take the time to think of it till it became a severe problem.
My second example is the military. The military is an organization staunchly ingrained in its ways. It takes moving heaven and earth to get them to change. Because of this, it becomes extraordinarily hard for them, and tenured companies, to see the value in paying for someone to tell them how to change their system which currently “works”. Even if the pros are clear, it can be hard to convince people to take money out of their bottom line for a product they can’t physically touch or see.
Hence, why the military is often stuck in incredibly old protocol which wastes time and labor and creates an administration heavy organization that simply does not need all of the overhead. While I may be talking about the government, you see this in large companies all of the time.
There is also a problem with sometimes process analytics doesn’t work, and there’s a decent Forbes article discussing that, though I do not agree with it completely.
I find it funny how all of the topics we cover seem like no-brainers, but in reality often need quite a bit of poking and prodding to see implemented.
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Predicting gone wrong
Between coming off of active duty and the start of college, I worked for a while in sales, selling electrical engineering software company. Obviously, like all companies that do a lot with sales, predicting quarterly revenue is hugely important. We had many resources dedicated to this, and were surprisingly successful at estimating every aspect of the sales.
Of course, this is not always true for all companies or all times. Often things go horribly awry. For example, Koch overestimated the tax revenue back in the day and put the city of New York is a very awful situation. This happens all of the time, especially when outsiders try to estimate revenues and make investments out of it. Recently, Starbucks posted revenues that were much less than what had been expected, causing a huge drop in share value and losing many many people quite a bit of money.
Predictions can do quite a bit more than people often think they do. And that is mostly the point of me writing this blog. I enjoy trading and reading about stocks, and have both won and lost money on predictions. They really can make a break an entire company.
It also goes back to decision trees, trying to see what is going to happen next and make decisions based off of this. It allows you to use the best information possible and go from there.
One of the organizations responsible for the biggest predictions of hot button issues is the Congressional Budget Office, which estimates effects of public policy. Their estimates often make or break certain bills, and also just go to show how truly important a prediction can be.
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Importance of End-User Awareness
As discussed in class this week, there are nearly countless threats to the security of an organization. From fire, to natural disaster, to terrorism and hackers, organizations must remain vigilant from outside threats to their information and practices.
Time and time again though, it’s shown that the greatest threat to an organization’s security comes from the inside. And no, I’m not talking about a malicious employee trying to screw over the company on their last day, though that does happen, I’m thinking more of either lazy or misinformed employees allowing massive breaches.
Guarding against these breaches is incredibly difficult. With natural disaster the answer is simple, build your building in a better way or secure better back-ups of data, etc. But with humans, you cannot “build” a better human who is more aware of phishing attacks and better follows policies. This is where awareness training becomes so important. This article speaks well to that topic, specifically discussing awareness training for phishing.
It is relatively cheap to remind employees that they should keep a closer eye on who is sending a message, or make sure the spelling is correct, or even just to feel comfortable calling an IT guy before clicking on any link or attachment. This small cost pays huge dividends, since a leak can do irreparable damage to actual data and beyond that even the brand itself.
Beyond phishing, there is the risk of not following policies regarding classified information. Perhaps the biggest stickler for these policies is the US military, which hammers this into the heads of its members, while also enforcing these policies to a T and imposing strict penalties on those who fail to do so. Of course, its a hell of a lot easier to enforce these rules with the weight of the military behind you rather than an organization.
Without malice, employees will often skirt around official channels when dealing with sensitive information because honestly, not leaving papers on desks and locking everything every single time can seem mundane and tedious. But it must be done.
Once again, this comes down to awareness. You MUST make it clear to employees how important it is to handle information correctly, make it clear to them that it will be strictly enforced, and integrate it into any sort of onboarding.
Not only is your company at risk, but it is your responsibility to your customers to safeguard their information.
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Relations Between Work and Different Databases
dI hate to always bring up work, but there are just so many relations between class and work, and I happen to spend a bit of my life there.
Part time to help support schooling I work security at a financial institution, and we have many applications to help with this job. Keep in mind throughout, that this is one of the largest companies on Earth and has nearly limitless resources.
We have to manage visitors, incident reports, daily logs, track packages and vehicles entering, along with employees that work for the company.
Obviously, there is a lot of overlap between all of this. One would think that it would be nice to have all of this on one system or at least shown as one viewing window so that one can track all these different entities. BUT, these systems were created before the company had this vast security (pre-9/11). They are showing their age, the GUI’s are trash and clunky. But more telling, they are all separate systems, hence why I am using “They”. We have a different system for visitors than we do employees, we track packages and vehicles on excel, and track incidents and daily logs on a completely different system.
Obviously this creates issues since you may have an incident that involves a visitor, an employee, a vehicle, and a package. There is no easy fix to this, and requires us to manually enter repeat data every single day.
When I asked about this because we talk in class about this all of the time, the response I got from higher ups is simply that it would take too long and too much money to take literally billions of records and compile them into one system. They just aren’t willing to do it.
So naturally, I wondered why we didn’t even have some way to use XML or equivalent to translate between applications so that they may update. The answer was the same: “Too much money, too much time”. Which I don’t exactly buy, but I digress.
Simply put, my lesson from this is that one MUST think of expansion and the future when creating databases and applications. If you do not, then you will be left with one of the most powerful companies on Earth crippling themselves with uselessly repetitive systems.
A simple Google Search returns articles like this talking about how it is one of the cardinal errors in database creation:https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/sql/database-administration/five-simple-database-design-errors-you-should-avoid/
Of course, it’s easier in theory than in practice, but still no excuse. And it shows, with this example that we even went over in class and shown in the excerpt from a book about topics in database systems https://books.google.com/books?id=DfF5DgAAQBAJ&pg=PA206&lpg=PA206&dq=How+costly+is+it+for+Ebay+to+change+their+database&source=bl&ots=j_8euKJ7Qt&sig=Bbc3jloZQS0iGSvnwJBhRvmOroA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiDxtzChJfXAhWSxIMKHRsYBygQ6AEIMTAC#v=onepage&q=How%20costly%20is%20it%20for%20Ebay%20to%20change%20their%20database&f=false
Ebay had to spend (still spending) millions responding to their poorly designed database, between security issues and just the reconstruction.
Seeing this real life example everyday when I go to work, I see how much money and time can either be saved or wasted by not thinking of these things in advance.
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Applying Information Science to Work
Last week, after attending IS2000 on Thursday, I left Northeastern to attend duty for the United States Marine Corps as part of my service commitment. As stated before, my job does deal with information technology, and this is my first experience working in my since taking IS2000.
So I thought, as all students do when they take so much as a week of class in a subject, I’m an information science expert! Why not apply what I’ve learned from class to the work I do?
Jokes aside, I know I’m not a subject matter expert, and I did not build any UML Diagrams or code in XML. But that does not mean I did not apply things I had learned in class to what we were doing! Often, when required to build a network, we simply have numbers written down that we need to plug in and simply go to work trying to figure it all out and plugging it in, expecting the new guys to just learn on the fly and get it done.
While this requires the least INITIAL work, and makes it look like you’re doing work immediately, it doesn’t exactly yield the best results. You often find yourself second guessing where you put certain configs, whether they’re on the right devices, and who did what.
So instead, I spent an hour drawing a diagram. It wasn’t UML, or XML, or really any specific notation. But I was able to visualize every configuration, where they were to go, what devices they were to go on, who would do them, and where they would connect.
While it wasn’t EXACTLY what we learned in class, I “interviewed” my peers, making sure there was no part of the diagram left unfilled. And just like Professor S. said, having the diagram made it painfully clear when you are lacking information, and allowed me to gather that information before I was knee deep in work and wondering what the hell was going on.
Not surprisingly, we were able to get our job done faster than we had ever done before, even though we spent an extra hour not touching a single piece of gear. The diagram also allowed us to communicate to each other exactly what we had done so that all team members were on the same page.
The articles at the end of this post highlight what we have hit upon in class, essentially that even though organization and modeling takes time, it actually saves you time and in many cases money and headaches.
I look forward to applying what I learn in class to further missions and making myself not only a better student, but a better Marine.
https://www.reference.com/business-finance/organization-important-3200545171ecd5c0
https://unclutterer.com/2014/01/23/benefits-of-being-organized/
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Memory
Today during the memory recovery of an archived file I realized how slow poorly designed databases can be. I was told by a supervisor (the company shall remain unnamed) to retrieve a file I should fill out. I knew where this file was, it was in my company database, but I had not accessed it in around a week or so. When I went to access it, I was told it was archived and I would have to retrieve it. Seeing as this company is in the top 15 grossing companies in the world, I saw this as a nonissue, a simple click of the button and I should have my file. After waiting 10-15 minutes, I talked to a member of the database engineering department. They told me that the way they had designed their database was specifically to only allow for current emails to be sent, and they have been having a problem accessing week long emails, since they had no idea how this database was designed. There was NOBODY who knew how the archived database was designed.
All they could tell me was that it was a relational database that allowed for telling customers’ data and literally directed me to this article as evidence that their supervisors were not able to figure out the way to do things: https://neo4j.com/blog/five-signs-to-give-up-relational-database/
It was sad, seeing an entire department handicapped by their system, but speaks to what we were discussing earlier in the semester, a poorly designed information system can destroy an entire company.
Upon questioning them further, the real problem became evident as told in this article by the Harvard Business review https://hbr.org/1999/07/why-good-companies-go-bad.
Basically, their system hadn’t changed since 1998. When they had 30 employees, the slow database didn’t matter that much. With so little data, it was fast and got the job done. But since expanding to over 700 employees trying to access tens of thousands of archived files, their database showed problems with expansion.
Databases MUST be designed with future expansion in mind and changes that could be possible taken into account.
If they do not, you will find an employee unable to their job, as I was, watching a loading screen slowly expanding over 25 minutes, as my little email was finally found by the terrible system.
Information is everything, and it deserves that attention.
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XML
For starters, let me say that my first experience with XML was awful. It came in the form of a Fundies I homework, and I had no idea what I was doing. Not only could I not figure out what XML was or why we were representing it in Racket, I also bombed the homework.
But alas, we must all start somewhere. And to be honest, XML has got me very excited about organization. Organization is obviously incredibly important, as highlighted in this article http://smallbusiness.chron.com/organization-skills-important-285.html about small businesses. In larger businesses, it becomes exponentially more so.
While I hate relating everything to the Marines, the size of the organization and its importance make it noteworthy, and I find its relation to XML incredible. For example, I am a Marine. As a Marine, I am part of a fire team, which is part of a squad, which is part of a platoon, which is part of a company, which is part of a battalion, which is part of a regiment, which is part of the division, which is part of the Marine Corps, which is part of the Navy, which is part of the Department of Defense. Whew.
That’s a long tree. And exemplifies why database organization is so vitally important, and why I hope that the Marine Corps continues to update its databases with the changing times, not only for security purposes but so that it may efficiently carry out its mission. Hard to communicate if you can’t figure out who’s in what database, huh?
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/sd-me-information-warfare-20170701-story.html. This article shows a sad fact. The Marine Corps is trying incredibly hard to do just this and also pushing cyber warfare, but with lack of funding, it is hard to put money aside for that when planes are falling into disrepair.
Hopefully, people will realize that while planes may be a more immediate concern, and might seem like a bigger issue, organization and updated databases are incredibly important and will come back to bite us if we do not put the time and effort into modernizing the systems that keep us safe.
We’ll see how XML treats me going forward!
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Socialization Problems in the Corps
This week when we were talking about the SECI model developed by Nonaka, I was thinking how hard it must be for organizations to formalize tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, and then to teach that to people and have them regain it as tacit knowledge. I pondered for examples of this I see in everyday life, and I realized that a huge part of my life daily sees this struggle.
As an enlisted Marine, there is quite a bit of technical and tactical knowledge I am responsible for, and I realize I have learned almost nothing from explicit sources. The Marine Corps knowledge relies almost completely on experience, rather than formalizing it so that it may be passed on in the absence of experienced Marines.
Technically, I am trained to build and maintain the networks needed for the Marine Corps to run, and was trained “formally” for nearly a year on this job. But once I got to my unit, I realized that not only did they have a completely different way of doing things, each unit had their own way of doing business, and were ingrained in that way, making the formal training almost completely useless.
Not only did this make it hard for me to learn, it also creates problems when units train or fight together, having to relearn new material rather than having a universal way of getting the job done.
To me, it seemed like a painfully inefficient way of training knowledge into me. In the end, it took nearly two years for me to feel that I was a subject matter expert, when with the right training I know that it could have taken only months.
Unfortunately, this is not an easy problem to tackle Much of what Marines know is learned in combat, which makes them very against changing their ways. They would rather trust what anecdotally kept them alive than the position of someone who was not fighting next to them, regardless of how researched and well thought out that knowledge may be.
One article highlights how hard it is for the American military to adapt to the new type of war we are fighting. While this has less to do with the change of knowledge from tacit to explicit, it is a great example of how the military would rather stick with what it tacitly believes is right, instead of looking at explicit knowledge to lead the way.
Of course, there are positives to this form of training. For example, unit cohesion is stronger when you train with a mentor rather than from a book. The problem is, as the war winds down, there are fewer and fewer combat vets, meaning that tacit knowledge is being lost and it becomes harder to train new Marines. The Marine Corps Times wrote an article on this, titled “Where Have All The Combat Vets Gone?”.
The Marine Corps faces an extremely tough decision: Either invest the time and money to preserve the tacit knowledge these combat veterans by transferring it to explicit knowledge, or lose years of hard earned lessons.
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