EAI Blog

While working on the second reading assignment (John S. Webster, "Health Services," Computerworld, July 2005) I came across the familiar name of John Halamka - a controversial CIO of Boston-based CareGroup.

Apparently, John Halamka has recovered from the famous 2002 fiasco which is known to the public as "Beth Israel's Health-Care IT Disaster" and is considered to be one of the worst health-care IT disasters in the history of mankind. The detailed description of that case can be found in the excellent Harvard Business School study.

After reviewing the study, I came to conclusion that CareGroup’s senior IT management concentrated their efforts on the technology side of IT and paid too little attention to the actual IT management. The case clearly shows that even the latest and greatest IT solutions are not able to prevent system failure if they are not supplemented with proper management and governance.

It looks like Care Group IT, being very proud of the highest level of the implemented technology, did not have a solid disaster recovery plan or a reliable backup process. Security management, network planning, and change control processes did not seem to be of good quality either.

Now Halamka is very excited about “seamless data integration” and web services. In the Computerworld article he calls them “… the glue that you can use to create a virtual system”. However, he does not even mention the challenges of SOA Governance, which seems to be an alarming symptom to me. I hope that the Care Group IT avoids another disaster.