Rapid Application Development with Facebook

Now is this a forward thinking hospital CIO...you bet...I just wish they could clone the CEO and CIO and send a few to California! I realize I put a lot of information about this hospital and the two blogging executives from this hospital, but heck, when someone is listening and creating such vast areas of transparency for healthcare and embracing current technology...others need to hear about it and so it is here on this blog....a while back I had posted an article about Churches going online for donations and said "why not hospitals"...I don't know if the post had anything to do with this story, but the point is that it is being done and with success...both blogs can be found under the blog roll section...good reading from both sites...Paul Levy and Dr. Halamka are certainly setting the pace....I was looking at some of the groups on Facebook the other day and I was surprised as well to see the growing number of hospitals who have created their own groups! BD

"Rapid Application Development" and "Extreme Programming" are buzzwords for new ways to deliver software that meets initial user requirements and continues to improve based on customer feedback. These approaches turn the IT department into an agile and forward thinking service provider. However odd this sounds, the answer may be Facebook.

A case in point. BIDMC is enhancing its external website and is currently preparing an RFP for online giving software. At 8am last Sunday, our BIDMC CEO, Paul Levy, created an online giving page using the Facebook Causes application. It's already been used by hundreds of people and the funds are beginning to roll in.

The IT department did not need to be involved, other than to offer support that the experiment was safe, secure and worth doing.
Should CIOs embrace it as a short term solution to many of the user requests for collaboration technologies? The answer is yes, with caveats.
Facebook is not a HIPAA business associate nor covered entity, so protected healthcare information should not be placed on Facebook. There is no service level agreement/quality of service guarantee, so it may be go down without notice (unlikely, but possible). It does not integrate with enterprise single signon based on Active Directory or LDAP.

Should CIOs try to replicate Facebook functionality on internal portals? For some circumstances that involve patients, the need for a guarenteed application availability, and integration with existing systems, the answer is yes. In my next generation of portal frameworks, I will support our own versions of all the Web 2.0 functionality (forums, wikis, groups, multimedia uploads) that is in Facebook, but I will also ensure that Facebook itself is used strategically. Staying agile and responsive to my customers requires that I embrace Facebook, not resist it.