Gregory Maciag

Health Data Standards

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has issued a call for unified data standards in health information. AHIMA “says it's prepared to work alongside vendors, insurers, providers and the federal government to develop needed industry-wide governance standards for health information technology”.  Modern Healthcare

Lightbulb Moment

I owe this insight to Nigel Davis of Willis. He showed a slide of recent floods in Thailand during his keynote at ITC 2012. He said insurers were able to make use of YouTube videos and still images from elsewhere to get a handle on the damage.

I'm getting so used to blanket statements about the value of social media to business that I almost don't hear them any more. But Davis had my attention. The floods, he explained, were caused by sudden heavy rain. The cloud cover meant satellite images were useless. Images created by people on the ground were the only way to assess the scene of the damage.

Mobile devices are turning ordinary folks into reporters. They don't need writing skills, an ax to grind or a media outlet to serve. By showing us what's happening in their lives, they can help business – and other organizations – react more effectively, and faster.

The Fourth "V"

Kudos to Mark Banks of AIR Worldwide, who added a fourth “V” to a trio of definitional attributes pertaining to big data. Contributing to a lively panel at ITC 2012, he added Validity to Volume, Variety and Velocity.

This is an important addition, because we need to make a distinction between having-lots-of-stuff and having-lots-of-useful-stuff. I sometimes get flashbacks to the heyday of data warehousing when I hear some people talk about big data. There's this magical thinking that creeps in and encourages us to believe quantity alone is somehow going to deliver quality.

Yes, big data enables us to discover new patterns. It enables us to react quicker and smarter. But only when the data is valid. It's only if we're certain what data items mean, and how they relate to each other, that we can do any useful work with them.

Banks also remarked that big data has always been ingrained in risk modeling. I'd take this a step further and say the kind of analysis people in other industries are now undertaking with big data is learned from insurance industry practices. Mainstream business is catching up with the core competencies of insurance as they gain the tools to better understand behavior.

DATA Update - Support Decision Making

The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA) has been revised – but data standards are still at the core of the new legislation. The new version reduces the reporting burden on grant recipients.

DATA will soon be a fact of life, and a major factor in federal decision making and operations. Accountability and transparency are rarely cited as the lead reasons for using data standards, but only because commercial organizations tend to measure benefit in dollars rather than principles. Yet accountability and transparency – with dollar signs attached – are fundamental to good business management too. You need your data to stand up to query, so that you can trust in it and act on it.

 

Steadfast Drives ACORD Standards in Australia

Robert Kelly, Steadfast Chairman, spoke at ITC 2012 on the benefits of ACORD Standards to the Australia insurance market.  Whether it was data messaging or ACORD Forms (something I remember proposing a few years back), he was ecstatic about the outcome.  Robert founded Steadfast (A network of brokers) and they are doing an IPO in 2013.

People are always looking for the seemingly illusive business case for industry standards. For Robert Kelly, ACORD Standards are just part of the business.  How refreshing!

Steadfast IPO

Steadfast Home Page

ACORD in Russia

Just as a follow-up to an earlier post. Here is a full view of ACORD coverage in Russia. Hope you can read Russian. Download 2012-10 Russian ACORD Article

Data - Information - Insight

“We are data rich, information poor, insight starved,” said Steve Betts, CIO of AON, at ITC 2012.

The traditional sequence is data, information, knowledge, wisdom. But I like Steve's formulation better. The problem with “knowledge” as a business aspiration is that it's inert. Knowledge isn't exactly power – you have to act on it, and action requires other capabilities, and even other types of knowledge. (Let's not even start on wisdom.)

“Insight” is a good term to use. It conveys the idea of our existing ideas being changed or clarified by the addition of new information. It implies we're looking to take action. And it very clearly asserts that we're interested in how other people think. I also like “starved”. We really do need insights. We'll perish without them.

Steve also talked about turning intuition into insight via data. This is a great way of encapsulating the exploratory nature of business development – and, I guess, all kinds of innovation. It also reminds us how we need to be ceaselessly asking questions about the performance of the business and its future. (Steve Betts is a member of the ACORD Board of Directors)

Is there a Single Version of the Truth?

Here is a view we published in Insurance Day this month. Meet IBM's Jeff Jonas.

Download ID 2012-10 Tech Focus

ACORD Standards Could Save Billions

Simon  Squires is Chairman of London Market Group’s working party and regional  chief processing officer at XLGroup. Read his interview at
Download 2012-10-12 Simon Squires

His answer to what other company do you most admire?  At the moment I am very impressed by Greg Maciag and his team at ACORD  who are providing a standards toolkit that the global insurance industry can deploy. This has the potential to generate billions of dollars of savings and improve transactional efficiency across the global insurer, co-insurer, reinsurer, and broking communities." 

He was a speaker at the ITC 2012 in London. I  spoke with Simon and he is eager to share the benefits of ACORD Standards. If you plan to be in Fort Lauderdale at the ACORD Implementation Forum (October 22-24) at the Harbor Beach Marriott Hotel, Simon will be here with us. 

Value of Verification: Is This Happening To You?

One speaker at ITC 2012 in London spoke of how the false economies of an earlier systems decision came to light during a subsequent data migration exercise. It seems the performance of an underwriting system had been speeded up by disabling its validation. This simple intervention improved performance by 20%, at no cost. Even better, underwriters using the system found they could put whatever they wanted in its fields. Instead of asking the IT team for enhancements to cope with new data items, they simply bent existing fields to new uses. This meant everyone was even happier, not only was the system faster, but development costs went down.

Two or three years later and the need for data migration after integration exposes the folly of this decision. The systems' fields were filled with disparate data that was hard to interpret. Dispensing with quality control brought apparent short-term benefits but created massive problems further down the line.

The company concerned dealt with the problem, bringing its systems discipline back in line and insisting on validation – and thereby data quality. The speaker went on to say that organizations across the industry must hold themselves responsible for the quality of the data they send each other and not try to offload the responsibility on to intermediate handlers of the data. Whatever you do inside the organization may be okay, bit at the interfaces you must have the discipline of standards.

It's interesting that the time delay between the poor decision to unhook validation and the integration blow-up was short – only a couple of years. Since people don't often share war stories like this, you might think data quality issues like this are only relevant to aged systems. But it seems that, perhaps under the pressure to perform cost miracles, and with a lack of direction about the value of data assets, IT folks can use the kinds of strategies we associate with an era of less frequent change and more expensive storage costs.

More important is the message that data quality is today more likely to be a concern of the business than the IT professional. After all, we migrate data because it's of interest to the business, not for the  sheer fun of it. We capture data because it's fundamental to the business – at the end of the day, it is the business.

We need to educate our IT colleagues on the value of data. It's not just “content”. Or rather, “content” is more valuable than such a generic term suggests. This data we generate, store, modify and share is the stuff of business.

Big Data Readiness

According to new research, executives feel they are not ready for the age of big data. “Nearly a third (29 percent) of executives gave their organizations a 'D' or 'F' in 'preparedness to manage the data deluge.' Another 31 percent rated preparedness with a grade of 'C'. Not having the right systems in place to gather the information they need is the biggest gripe of 38 percent of executives. Following close behind, 36 percent said their organizations weren't able to provide their business managers access to the information, and 29 percent said they were using systems that weren't designed to meet their industry's unique needs.”

I'm not sure how to disentangle “not having the right systems in place” from “using systems that weren't designed to meet their industry's unique needs”. Also, saying 36% aren't able to provide access to relevant information doesn't automatically mean the relevant information actually exists in the first place. Surveys like this can be difficult to interpret because they take the measure of a current concern and map it to a menu of potential deficiencies, each of which is likely to have widespread effects as well as being somewhat subjective.

To get real picky, show me an organization that is consistently and comprehensively using systems designed to meet the industry's unique needs. The industry's unique needs continually change. Also, the whole point of “the data deluge” is that it's meant to deliver surprises. Big data is going to show us industry needs beyond our expectations.

A positive approach to this question would be to pitch a menu of capabilities that executives could choose from in building their active response to the data deluge. These could include, for example: The ability to gather any and all types of information relating to objects and activities in our industry. And: Using systems that were designed around industry standards for data and standard process models.

Being ready for big data means being ready to handle any item or mass of data as meaningful information. So, your systems and practices need to be based on open standards agreed for your industry – standards whose evolution is actively managed on behalf of the community using them.  Failing

Identifier Failure Proves Costly

I like to collect figures relating to the benefits of standards. Sometimes these figures are like tiny case studies. Other times, they just make you go “wow”.  

Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition gives an example of how the lack of standard identifiers can waste time, effort, and enormous amounts of money. If federal loan assessors had been able to match SEC reports on solar panels start-up Solyndra, it's unlikely the company would have got its $527m in federal loan guarantees – before filing for bankruptcy just two years later.  If only complex organizations knew what they know.

Data Informed

Data for Action

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”

Information management expert Rob Johnson uses this quote from Sherlock Holmes to remind us that “even today decision makers need all the evidence before taking action or enacting policy. Information managers need to stress that information is a business asset just like the buildings, the IT equipment or the people. What you create may be useful to others down the line, but if it’s locked away in a personal drive or labelled incorrectly the potential value is diminished”.

We need a general change in attitudes, so that people think about the wider value of the information they are generating and processing. It's on all of us to realize that what we do with information may be part of a much bigger picture that we can't see – or that hasn't yet come into being,

By the way, Sherlock’s use of the word “capital” means “punishable by the death penalty”. I don't think we can really implement that. National Archives UK

Clinical Trial Standards Cut Red Tape

“Why do some [companies] record that male is a 0 and female is a 1, and others use 1 and 0, and others use M and F. Where is there any competitive advantage to doing that?” says Garry Neil, interim CEO, Transcelerate Biopharma

Ten major drug companies have launched a non-profit organization to create industry data standards. The body, Transcelerate Biopharma, will focus on standards in non-competitive and collaborative aspects of drug trials.

The industry as a whole will save money, and time to market should improve. It's good to see another industry sector recognizing that working together on standards can raise the game for everyone. Standards don't mean uniformity of output. Standards enable excellence by tearing out pointless duplication, confusion and rework. In this way they promote competition.  Cut Red Tape

Missed Opportunity Cost

Scanning an update from the IQ Consortium, which looks after data standards in the pharmaceuticals industry, I was struck by one of the benefits of standards mentioned alongside the well-known ones. Costly, unreliable and hard-to-share information make up the usual suspects. Here's the novel addition: “Obstacles for data exchange also contribute to 'missed opportunity' costs because they make it difficult to collaborate and innovate.”

This is so true – and so hard to measure, or insert in a business case. Yet there is no doubt that for organizations of all shapes and sizes, in all walks of life, the inability to share data is the greatest missed opportunity of them all.

Once you can speak some of the language of your community, your world enlarges. Once you have currency that others trust, you can trade. Once you have standards for data exchange, you can learn more, do more business, discover synergies... It's like entering a whole new dimension.

We need business leaders to state clearly that collaboration and innovation are not just buzzwords, or nice-to-have's, or things that we'll get around to doing after we fix everything else. Collaboration and innovation are the future. Without them, there is nothing ahead. The scale of a “missed opportunity” could be the very opportunity to continue in existence. Get into standards, and grow your opportunities.  IPQ

Centralization

During a workshop on data standards and the DATA Act, Bill Franks of Teradata said the first step toward cutting waste and streamlining data in government is centralizing how it’s managed. “This is not revolutionary or futuristic,” he said. “These are standard processes that commercial organizations do every day.”

That's not totally fair. There are plenty of commercial organizations who struggle to bring consistency and coherence to their data assets – and not just distributed or federated organizations. With the growing diversity of value chains, the concept of centralization is becoming even harder to turn into reality. Also, public servants have traditionally been pretty good at formulating standard processes and rolling them out.

It's not centralized repositories that will deliver data transparency to US citizens, but standard definitions, formats and relationships for data. Get the semantic architecture right, and a diversity of solutions can deliver our goals for more open government. Federal Standards

LMG Newsletter - London

Ian Summers, CIO for Aon Risk Solutions & Aon Benfield says: "It is a basic fact of any industry that if there are no clients there is no business. Without someone willing to pay for the thing, no product has any value. It is remarkable, therefore, how much time we in our market, in this newsletter and at our many, many meetings, manage to spend discussing all sorts of aspects of our business and our processes without ever mentioning the one set of people that really matter – our customers. I think we are standing at a pretty important point in the modernisation process.

Read more in the London Market Group newsletter. Download LMG News OCT12PUB