Same Old Battle Still Rages
While I agree with your supposition, I can't help but find it ironic ("Business Technology Needs A Youth Movement," Feb. 5). If I substitute the term PC for the Web apps you mention, this article could have appeared more than 20 years ago.

I've been in IT for a long time, and there's always been the old guard/new guard battle going on. Fortunately, I've always moved forward with technology, and I'm a huge proponent of the Web 2.0 and beyond technologies that are appearing.

Part of me looks at where we are and says, "Yes! We're finally making it to what I envisioned thousands of years ago when I entered the field." That same part wishes I could restart my career (while retaining my knowledge) with the veritable candy store of powerful technologies that are now available. Which takes me back to my original reason for writing: There will always be vested interests who are terrified by the prospect of new technological paradigms upsetting the apple carts they have labored for years to create.

Gary Rosensteel
President, DigiBrix
McMurray, Pa.

Unhealthy Solution
I just wished you'd asked a doctor why he or she isn't using the National ePrescribing Patient Safety Initiative system before publishing your article ("Time To Sign Up, Doc," Jan. 22).

This is not evenly a thinly veiled attempt by tech companies to feed on the American medical system's precarious funding--they are quite open about it.

At our medical office, we don't have Internet access in individual rooms in our office. We have to leave the patient's room to access an Internet-enabled computer. This computer, like all Windows systems, goes into sleep mode after a period of nonuse. This means waiting for the computer to return to its awake mode. Internet connections are also periodically closed for security reasons. All this increases the time spent on the computer--time that otherwise could be spent with the patient.

Writing by hand can be done in front of the patient, without being distracted by typing into a laptop or trying to see if a tablet PC is accurately capturing your handwriting.

I'm a computer/gadget geek and use a PDA routinely in my day-to-day work. But my technical knowledge allows me to say that while the computer world is progressing, it has not reached the point of an easy-to-use, inexpensive, and secure prescribing system.

Stephen Kirk, M.D.
Salem, N.H.

Barriers To Collaboration
Your article hit home with me, especially Jerry Johnson's comments: "In today's scientific environment, you don't get grants unless you're collaborating with others," he says ("One CIO's Life On The Edge Of IT Innovation," Jan. 1/8). "Having collaboration tools that work across the Internet on a global scale with collaborators in other countries and with other institutions is key."

For a long time, National Institutes of Health funded grants for analytical instruments and people and never considered informatics, or what I call the "glue that holds everything together." Now, NIH has changed the ground rules and the recent translational research grants absolutely require collaboration. The gotcha is that collaborators across diverse sites are often left to their own devices to create an informatics solution, and that means the data at each site is often siloed. Obviously, that makes collaboration more difficult. The funding agencies really need to step up and understand that if data remains bottled up, collaboration is not impossible, but certainly more difficult.

Richard J. Maguire, Ph.D.
Director, Translational Research Project Management
Roswell Park Cancer Institute
Buffalo, N.Y.

It's All In The Design
Interesting piece ("Bugged About Software: How Hard Can It Be?" Jan. 22). I have been blessed to be a part of as well as a solution provider for a number of large projects. Although we can point to a number of systemic engineering failure points (communications, misuse of technologies, and general lack of craftsmanship), what seldom gets mentioned is the societal effect. People, teams, and companies aren't equipped to manage large things. Simply being a part of the fray doesn't constitute mastery of the large-model paradigm. It is by its very nature cumbersome, tedious, and fraught with challenges.

There are lessons to be learned, and in almost all cases design is the key. Some might choose to throw solutions, such as process or tools, against the large project, but it simply doesn't work until the multilevel/multifaceted design issues are dealt with.

Jerry E. Durant
Managing Director, Certellus
Winter Springs, Fla.