Designing Applications

04/09/17

Big data is a field that is truly exploding in recent years. It has become a bit of a buzzword in the media but it is truly making huge strides in the way we can track and model population-sized data. Dignity Health uses big data to help medical caregivers every day with alert systems, predictive models, and tracking systems for the physicians. It allows them to monitor different parts of the patient's status and alert the physician when they would otherwise not be able to personally monitor them given the large volume of patients in a hospital.

Working with big data applications was something that was a bit of a shock for me; I imagined a timeline for a typical project, even a large one, was on the order of weeks or maybe a few months, but the systems they design can take years to implement. This itself naturally lends to less mobility in larger corporations, as I have observed, but gives me a true appreciation of what goes into these projects that may only have a few core components. When designing a system to handle this much data, they have several different stages and iterations that the product will go through, adding or removing aspects at the request of the end user. It must have very low tolerances for error, especially when this data is in some cases patient's personal data. However, large systems becoming long arduous tasks to create, with a lack of strong direction, constantly changing as there is little way for the end user of the program to essentially draw out the functionality of the application or product. If they were to draw out or prototype what exactly what they want, it would take too long for them or they would essentially create it themselves.

I see improvement possibilities in the way large and small projects are managed in the enterprise. Now, I may not have a full picture but it does seem there is room for improvement in the way our end users communicate what they want out of an application, as opposed to roughly describing it in an email. Dignity Health has been experimenting with prototyping tools and new ways to organize a team under the banner of organizing requests from users so they do not have to revise the product repeatedly because what they initially produce does not exactly match what the user imagined. This should help shorten timelines for projects but also allow for increased mobility as they can spend the time working on new initiatives or actually reworking the applications, rather than remaking them due to not meeting the initial image of the end user.