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This week I attended an IBM software technology briefing about SOA. Only brilliant technical people could come up with SOA as a name for something. Let's see, is it safe operating area, School of the Americas, Skies of Arcadia (a Nintendo game), Society of Actuaries, state of the art, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Nope. Maybe it is about an architectural firm that has great customer service? Or maybe it is about the architecture of a building that has a good service entrance? Neither. The SOA of the briefing stands for "service oriented architecture". It is really important. The wikipedia has a comprehensive definition of SOA but basically it is about a new way to get things done with software. Actually it is isn't new -- the idea has been around for decades -- but now it is really happening. It is so much a part of the vernacular at IBM that they just matter of factly call it "so a". After an IBM briefing about "virtualization" a year ago, I tried to explain the word in simple terms (see Virtually Real or Really Virtual). I'll try that approach here with SOA.

In a nutshell, SOA will allow web sites to do much more than “click here to buy”. In fact web sites built with SOA will result in us standing in fewer lines in the physical world and have to endure fewer telephone call centers that want to control us. Fulfillment models at our favorite retailer’s web site will result in the staple goods we need just showing up outside the garage door when we need them. If businesses have the right attitude, SOA will enable them to get closer to the ultimate Internet -- to build a people-oriented and user-friendly integrated experience for all parties involved - employees on the intranet, suppliers, customers, partners, analysts and prospective constituents. There is more to this story. (read more)

What? An entire book just about designing navigation on the Web? Yes, that's right. And if you think about it for a while you'll probably realise that there is a need for a book on that subject. Heck, considering the number of sites out there that are incredibly hard to navigate, there is room for plenty of books that explain how to create Web navigation that works.

And you're very likely to have run into problems more than once when trying to figure out how to make a website or Web application easy and intuitive not only for yourself, but for your own or your client's end users, to find their way around. Designing Web Navigation by James Kalbach aims to help you master the fundamentals of navigation design. While there is no guarantee that you will master the subject, reading this book will definitely give you a lot of insight into the problems that you encounter in navigation design as well as possible solutions to those problems.

The way Designing Web Navigation is structured makes it usable not only as a book you read from cover to cover, but also as a reference to keep handy for the next time a tricky navigation problem shows up. It can also give you arguments to use in discussions with clients or other team members when there is something that doesn't feel quite right about the solution somebody is suggesting but you can't put it into words. In fact, it may also make you look at the problem from a different angle and realise that maybe your solution isn't the best one.

The author starts the first part of the book by explaining the foundations of Web navigation. Those foundations include why we even need navigation in the first place, how we use Web browsers to interact with websites, the most common types of navigation on the Web, and how we can label navigation to make it easy to understand.

The second part of the book is called 'A Framework for Navigation Design', and is focused on providing you with a systematic approach to designing Web navigation. It does that by describing a number of phases that you will often move through while turning a concept into a working navigation system.

In the third and final part, James Kalbach takes a closer look at navigation in special contexts, such as before and after searching, in social tagging systems, and how Web applications can be navigated.

Throughout the book there are many references to accessibility and internationalisation issues that can be caused by some types of navigation. It's great to see that those two very important aspects of Web navigation aren't overlooked here as they are in many other places.

Overall this is a great book that I enjoyed reading. The examples and references are current and credible. One area that has room for improvement is the layout and typography, which I think could be more usable. Line-length is a bit too long for the book to be a really comfortable read, and page numbers are smaller than the text on websites designed by ad agency art directors.

But don't let that discourage you from picking up a copy of this book. My impression is that there is a lot of research behind this book, and I think all web designers and front-end developers can learn something from it.

Designing Web Navigation

Author: James Kalbach

ISBN-10: 0596528108

ISBN-13: 978-0596528102

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Posted in Reviews, Usability.

Over the past year or so we've seen a definite increase in the number of questions we get about open source content management and portal software at NetRelations. I'm not quite sure of the reason for this trend, but nevertheless it's refreshing to see people beginning to 'think different' in the otherwise very Microsoft-dominated country that Sweden is.

It may be a welcome change, but I find choosing a CMS incredibly difficult, and evaluating them is very time consuming and often frustrating. There are hundreds of options, one worse than the other. To date I have never come across a CMS that doesn't have serious flaws. Even if a CMS looks good at a glance, once you start digging deeper you will always encounter problems with usability, accessibility, and front-end code.

Content Management Systems

A couple of times in the past I have asked my readers for CMS suggestions, but it's been a while now. Last time we ended up using Plone, which was a real pain to work with. I don't know if the situation has improved by now (it's been three years), but just thinking about working with it gives me a stomach ache. So we want to look at other options, and I'd like to ask what you all think.

We've been looking around for a while and two of the very few systems that look like they could be worth spending more time with are ModX and Drupal. Their approaches to content handling are quite different, so they would most likely suit different kinds of clients.

The first thing I would like to get some input on is how good ModX and Drupal really are. I'm thinking both for developers who will need to customise the CMS to fit the clients' needs and for the end users who will work with the admin interfaces to create content and structure sites. I'm looking for answers to the following questions:

• How easy (or hard) are ModX and Drupal to develop for?
• How easy (or hard) is using them to create content and administer websites?
• Are there any problems creating fully standards compliant and accessible websites with either system? Do they allow full (and I really mean full) control of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or do they contain uncustomisable black boxes?
• Are their admin interfaces reasonably accessible? If not, can they be made accessible?

That's one bunch of questions. Next, the vague topic of 'portals'.

Portal Software

Some large organisations are asking about open source portal software to use instead of commercial solutions like IBM WebSphere (WPS) or Microsoft Sharepoint (MOSS). I have some experience with both WPS and MOSS, and while making a public-facing website based on either system standards compliant and accessible is achievable with a bit of work, fixing the interface presented to a logged-in user seems more or less impossible. In other words, to be better than either of those two in the web standards, accessibility and usability departments should be really easy.

It seems that most open source portal platforms are Java based. Liferay, JBoss Portal, and Apache Jetspeed are some. They all seem like incredibly complicated pieces of software that are beyond my capability to understand. That has got me thinking... would it be possible to use Plone or Drupal as a portal? Yes, I know I complained about Plone being hard to develop for earlier, but compared to others it is pretty good at web standards and accessibility.

Does anyone reading this have experience from open source portal software? The questions I'm looking for answers to are the same as for the content management systems.

Their standards aren't our standards

As a sidenote it's pretty fascinating to note that when CMS and portal software vendors boast about 'Standards compliance', 'Open standards', and 'Interoperability' they do not mean what you might think they mean.

To them, those terms have little to do with the front-end, so having a 'Standards compliant, interoperable' portal solution does not mean that it outputs valid HTML and CSS and will work in any browser. Instead, it means it will run on any server that means the requirements. Huge difference.

To summarise this little call for input: any suggestions, hints, and recommendations on open source content management and portal software are welcome.

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Posted in Content Management.

The Intellectual Property briefing by IBM on May 2 in Greenwich was extremely interesting and I hated to leave a bit early but there was an overlap with another briefing down the road in Stamford, Connecticut -- this one about healthcare. IBM's healthcare and life sciences business is huge with 4,000 employees and revenues in the U.S. alone that would put it well into the Fortune 500. The company counts as customers 8 of the top 12 hospitals and all of the top 30 pharmaceutical companies. What has really put IBM on the healthcare map is last year's acquisition of Healthlink, which brought with it 400 top healthcare consultants. The insight of the consultants plus the smorgasbord of IBM technology has put the company on a mission -- to be a major factor in creating "Transformed Healthcare".

IBM's vision is significant -- to build patient-centric information systems, shared health and wellness management systems, and integrated networks to pull it all together among the payers, the providers, and the patients. Many of the benefits are obvious but some are more subtle. Payer insurance companies may be transformed from claims processors to wellness concierges. Smoother workflow and process optimization due to better integration and access to information can lead to improved quality, fewer errors and lower healthcare costs.

IBM has a vested interest in becoming the leader at these things because it has a half-million employees and retirees. Their Global Health and Wellness program is a partner in developing solutions for clients and may itself become a model. The company not only has a wealth of information at the intranet web portal but also enables an electronic health record into which employees enter their personal information which is then supplemented by automatic updating from claim and pharmacy data. The company also provides incentives to exercise and stay healthy. As a result, IBM's labor cost is significantly lower than industry averages.

The conference was attended by several dozen healthcare software vendors and various industry experts, including more than a half-dozen physicians. Most of the discussions revolved around the notion of "Patient centric" -- connecting healthcare information about patients with insurers and healthcare providers for the benefit of the patient. The key to make all this work is standards and they will evolve through Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO) and a National Health Information Network (NHIN). The RHIO includes consumers, hospitals, labs, pharmacies, payers, public health offices, and physicians. Progress is being made. A presentation was made by John Blair, MD, who is CEO of Taconic Healthcare Information Network, a RHIO just west of the Hudson River. They have connected practices, hospitals, labs and payers and have developed standardized electronic health records, e-mail access to physicians, and e-prescriptions. The NHIN has asked four IT companies to work on interconnection of the RHIO's. Part of IBM's NHIN architecture will be based on royalty-free health care information systems patents (discussed in the IP meeting earlier that day) which give priority access to requests for patient information coming from emergency rooms vs. routine office requests.

From a purely heath point of view, the biggest transformation will come from information based medicine that bridges healthcare and life sciences. Molecular level understanding of disease is being made possible, in part by supercomputers such as BlueGene, and the result will be the development of targeted drugs. In other words, based on a DNA sample and genomic analysis, a diagnosis and treatment can be based on our individual medical history and genetic predispositions. Whole new fields are opening up including pre-emptive medicine, pharmacogenomics and clinical decision intelligence. A small device the size of a cell phone can take a sample of your  blood and determine your rate of metabolism which in turn affects how much of a drug you need to provide optimal results. It will soon be possible to predict the likelihood of a person getting something deadly but yet preventable.

Advanced analytics are beginning to provide the ability to run complex algorithms to answer complex questions. For example, there is a 100 page document that provides guidelines on how to perform a particular surgical procedure. It is based on the "average" person. Nobody is average so would it be nice to be able to have a system which can provide specific recommendations based on many variables that are particular to an individual -- providing the surgeon with a "how to" guide unique to each patient.

Molecular Profiling Institute is creating tools for genomic and proteomic profiling and treatment of cancers. Seventy of our 40,000 genes can predict breast cancer accurately. Dr. Robert Penny showed incredible examples. A particular gene that is missing or not working can tell the cause of a particular disease and a drug that can attack that specific gene can fix it and the patient can be cured. This is called "jumping diseases" -- using a cure for disease xyz to treat disease abc. Dr. Penny showed before and after images of a dying cancer patient. After the application of a drug that attacked the targeted gene, the cancer disappeared. It gave the audience a lump in their throats.

There are many new issues arising along with the breakthroughs. For example, being able to know you have high odds of getting xyz disease for which there is no prevention and no cure after getting it, is questionable. The trend from physician centric to payer centric to patient centric is accelerating. It is likely that what will be accomplished in the next ten years will be vastly more than what has been accomplished in the last one hundred.

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