Richard Soley's On The Road Blog

Open Standards for Software Radio

As snow pummeled the U.S. northeast once again, I set off back on February 7^th for an unusual triangle trip – Washington, DC (to meet with the leadership of Open Health Tools, which is building open-source healthcare IT solutions based partially on OMG standards); then to Santa Barbara, California to meet with Ivar Jacobson and Bertrand Meyer (together we are leading an effort to reinvent software engineering as a rigorous engineering discipline). Last stop on this whistle-stop tour was San Diego, California, to meet with the Joint Program Executive Office Joint Tactical Radio System (JPEO JTRS) at the Point Loma United States Navy base in San Diego harbor.

And a whistle-stop it was, too – while I had intended from the start to avoid California driving by taking the lovely train ride from Santa Barbara to San Diego, the week started out unexpectedly with a 7 ½-hour ride from Boston to Washington as the third major storm of the year blanketed the U.S. capital with another 50cm (20”) of snow.  It was quite strange to see no snow at all on the ground on the entire trip south until noticing a light rime in Philadelphia and perhaps 10cm (4”) in northern Delaware. My hometown of Baltimore, however, was staggering under about 30cm (12”) of snow, and the capital was essentially in lockdown from yet another blizzard. The quiet of downtown Washington (except for people sloshing about in snow, ice & slush) was in fact quite lovely. I will resist the impulse to make metaphorical comparisons between a city closed for business, and political processes in a similar state nearby!

Instead I’d like to focus on an excellent meeting at JPEO JTRS where I was privileged to share a cup of coffee with John Armantrout, Chief Technology Officer (and briefly meet Dr. Rich North, Technical Director as well). This is the group that manages the U.S. Department of Defense acquisition process for software radios, an important area of standards development at OMG.

JTRS JPEO has strongly supported open standards in general and OMG in particular for years. In addition, OMG has worked alongside the Wireless Innovation Forum (WIF, previously known as the SDR Forum) for years. OMG and WIF are committed to strengthening, deepening and extending the cooperation between our two organizations, and have several projects currently underway to not only strengthen current cooperation, but also to look for more opportunities to serve our members and the industry. This includes my own personal focus, moving standardized software radio technology into the commercial sphere – where immediate benefits will include better mobile phone interoperability, wider and cheaper roaming capabilities, and not coincidentally lower cost for military software radio installations. Look for OMG and WIF to make some interesting announcements in the coming weeks!

Welcome to the Inaugural "On the Road"

As anybody who knows me can attest, I travel…a lot. I need the frequent flyer miles (I’m down to my last million). Most of this travel is on behalf of OMG. I’ve met some truly fascinating people and spoken at more conferences and organizations than I can easily count. And if we’ve ever had the pleasure of an in-person meeting, you probably also know that I have an awful sense of humor (and an inability to keep it to myself). Unfortunately for me, my staff thinks I nevertheless need to share my wit with a broader audience. After suffering through yet another round of “Richard, when are you going to blog about your travels and tell the world about the cool stuff that’s going on at OMG?” from my loyal staff, I’ve finally capitulated. It was either that or invest in a pair of earplugs. So in this space, I’ll be sharing with you stories from my travels and news that doesn’t necessarily make it into the open through more official channels but certainly deserves recognition. For my inaugural blog entry, I’d like to tell you about my recent trip to the HL7 International quarterly meeting, and the importance of OMG’s work in healthcare standards.

 

In case you haven’t seen the news, OMG and HL7 International recently issued a press release detailing some of our accomplishments from 2009. You can read it here. The press release is a pretty standard listing of individual achievements – but in reality, there has been some real forward progress in service-oriented healthcare IT standards.

 

We’re pretty excited about the work we’re doing, which is ultimately helping healthcare organizations provide higher-quality, lower-cost healthcare through standards. When you get right down to it, that’s about saving lives, which seems like a worthy goal. I’ve been regularly attending, along with the OMG Healthcare Domain Task Force co-chairs Ken Rubin and Robert Lario and our counterparts at HL7, monthly leadership calls to discuss progress and areas for future collaboration. I recently returned from the HL7 quarterly meeting in Phoenix (week of January 18, 2010) where I spoke with many people excited about the work we’re doing on HSSP. And it’s not just the private sector that’s excited about healthcare IT; the US, UK, Australian, Costa Rican, Canadian and Singapore governments are very active in this space.

 

(Take a look at the presenters at the 2009 SOA in Healthcare Workshop to get an idea of the broad industry and government involvement in healthcare IT: keynotes for this workshop included: The Honorable James B. Peake, M.D., Lieutenant General, USA (Ret) Secretary of Veterans Affairs from 2007 – 2009; and Theresa Cullen, M.D., M.S., RADM, U.S. Public Health Service, Chief Information Officer, Indian Health Service. You’ll also see presenters from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (US); the Department of Veterans Affairs; the National Health Service; US Military Entrance Processing Command (MEPCOM) and many more. We’ll be holding another SOA in Healthcare workshop in 2010. Be sure to stay tuned for details.)

 

Thanks for checking out the first installment of “On the Road.” I’ll be periodically updating this space with anecdotes from my travels and news of note from OMG.

 

— Richard