On Thursday February 25, Talkstandards hosted a lively open forum on ICT Standardization and eHealth.

Ajit Jaokar spoke of the possibility that eHealth will take off in emerging markets and what the implications thereof could be. As an illustration, Jaokar mentioned the M-Pesa mobile payment service which took off in Kenya, serving 6.5 million subscribers by May 2009
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In an exclusive interview with Talkstandards, Professor David Ingram of openEHR, one of the most innovative players in the eHealth field, outlines some of his expectations for the future of ICT in the health care sector. This transcript has been prepared from notes taken during a telephone interview on February 22nd.

Part III: Openness, implementation and governance
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In an exclusive interview with Talkstandards, Professor David Ingram of openEHR, one of the most innovative players in the eHealth field, outlines some of his expectations for the future of ICT in the health care sector. This transcript has been prepared from notes taken during a telephone interview on February 22nd.

Part II: eHealth in an international perspective
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In an exclusive interview with Talkstandards, Professor David Ingram of openEHR, one of the most innovative players in the eHealth field, outlines some of his expectations for the future of ICT in the health care sector. This transcript has been prepared from notes taken during a telephone interview on February 22nd.

Part I: The Future of eHealth
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There has been a lot of talk about the future of the Flash format especially after the launch of the iPad since both the iPad and the iPhone do not support Flash.

Like many people, I am a fan of HTML5 and recent developments in the evolution of HTML5 indicate that it will now become the technology of choice for all browser vendors. Flash is the current de-facto web standard for video.
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Recently, Google posted a much publicised memo called the Meaning of Open in which Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management attempted to define Open. Attempting to define ‘Open’ is a complex task with many contradictions, and it is good that Jonathan has attempted this.
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Along with Open source and Open standards, we now have a new phrase; i.e. Open Government.

What does Open Government imply for standards?

Let’s take a step back. Prior to 1999, I used to work for an ERP vendor. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a complex class of software that is typically intended to manage all the functions of a company (such as Accounts Payable, General Ledger, Billing and so on). Inspite of their complexity, there was a mad scramble to install ERP systems which was mainly motivated by the Y2K deadline.

However, did ERP really make a difference in terms of innovation?

Not really.

ERP was all about internal functions of an organization, the ‘plumbing’ so to speak. It made very little difference to the customers as to what billing system a company used or what General Ledger the company used.

Last week, the White House adopted Drupal, the Open source content management system which has a strap line of ‘community plumbing’. Whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal. However, like ERP, if it is used only for internal functions (aka ‘plumbing’) – it should make no difference to anyone at all…

After all, Whitehouse.gov is a pretty structured website in terms of its content; photos of the President, videos, some blogs, information on legislation etc. And that content is mostly structured (apart from comments). One could argue that Drupal has many extensible libraries that third parties can build. But so do many other platforms.

Thus, the adoption of Drupal should be viewed more as a symbolic gesture for the use of Open Source; and in that role lies its greater significance and implications for standards.

Tim O’Reilly discusses the wider impact of the Drupal announcement under the concept of Gov 2.0.

The introduction of the terms Open Government/ Gov 2.0/ ‘Web 2.0 for Government’ adds to two already complex terms i.e. ‘Open Source’ and ‘Open Standards’. As viewed by Tim O’Reilly, Open Government is the concept of ‘Government as a platform’ which could also be seen as ‘Web 2.0 for Government’.

Web 2.0 itself is a philosophy i.e. a broad concept based on the foundation of Data, which many people wrongly equated to specific technologies (like the AJAX programming language).

Similarly, Open source (the technological foundation) is not necessarily needed for Open Government (which could be viewed as the concept/philosophical foundation of ‘Government as a platform’).

The question of whether Governments should mandate specific standards or technologies is more complex. Today, in the minds of most people we have a benevolent administration in the White House. But administrations can change every five years, and often they do. And consequently, enthusiasm for Government led ideas can wane.

The philosophy of Openness is correct, as is the idea of ‘Government as a platform’. However, just like Web 2.0, its technological implementation may be varied.

The standards for Open Government may be independent of the technology that is used to implement its internal systems as long as the philosophy of Openness and the idea of the ‘Government as a platform’ is maintained.

It has been a year since Google launched its browser Chrome. So far its market share is below 3 percent. Despite superior technical performance, standards-compliance and open source it is still struggling well behind market leader IE and runner-up Firefox. Perhaps this experience serves to prove the old truth that innovation is not only about invention but also about marketing and distribution? At least this seems to be the lesson drawn at Googleplex.
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Background:

This blog is a summary of my discussion at the talkstandards forum last week in Brussels. I see both the talk and the event as the continuation of a debate – both online and offline.
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Like many people, I did not think highly of the Open Cloud manifesto episode last week and now that some resolution seems to have come of it with the apology from CCIF, it’s time to leave the CCIF manifesto episode behind to the wider issues.

I have been trying to take a pragmatic view about the current and future role of standards for some time, albeit from the perspective of mobility where the issue has existed for a while now.

Standardization for the Cloud offers an opportunity to rethink standards themselves since many of the older paradigms do not apply in the new world dominated by the Cloud (or rather they become irrelevant/commodities).

So, much like the parable of new wine in old wineskins, there is little point in framing new discussions in context of the old.

Let me explain.
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