[FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

[Chris Feola]

“Of course they did not have access to real databases, nor did they have to solve problems of data reconciliation among those disparate databases. This kind of infrastructure, as was pointed out, would have added significant time for them to complete a 'full function' app.”

This reminds me of the old Monty Python sketch How To Do It-How To Play The Flute: Well, you blow in one end and move your fingers up and down so the right notes come out. ANYONE could have built the site in a week or two if they didn’t have to connect it to the legacy databases. Features are easy, and preexisting ones– how long have companies been selling insurance online? – are stupid easy.

Data is hard. Integration is really, really hard.

Here’s just one problem: Take a look at, say, your Amazon account. How many shipping and billing addresses are there? How many are duplicates-say, where the shipping and billing address are the same?

Now, the user changes a zip code. Do you update any of the other addresses? If so, which ones?

That ONE problem is called Master Data Management, and companies spent $11.3 BILLION trying to solve it in 2020.

Sorry for the rant. Just an old CIO venting.

Cjf

Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10

From: Prof David West<mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>
Sent: Sunday, March 14, 2021 9:45 AM
To: friam at redfish.com<mailto:friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] I am accepting wagers

At the peak of the healthcare.gov fiasco, Sixty Minutes, did a segment on a small company in San Francisco — five people — built site with all the capabilities, including calculating subsidies (supposedly the most difficult feature), of the official site. It took them a weekend (supposedly) — but definitely some very short time span as they did not begin the effort until the bad publicity became prominent and the episode aired less than two weeks after the initial debut/failure of the official site.

Of course they did not have access to real databases, nor did they have to solve problems of data reconciliation among those disparate databases. This kind of infrastructure, as was pointed out, would have added significant time for them to complete a 'full function' app. And, of course, because they were not the government nor the government approved contractor they would never have been allowed access.

davew


On Sat, Mar 13, 2021, at 7:59 PM, jon zingale wrote:
"""
I can see a lot more work needed that will never be seen from the public’s side of the system. The 50,000 sites will not be constant. Some new ones will come, and some will go. Hospitals, public health departments, independent as well as chain pharmacies have to feed information into the system. How do they pass that information? How do they prove they are not a hacker and have the authority to change hours, capacity, availability of vaccine, location, etc. Are there mechanisms for weeding out defunct and out-of-date vaccination sites? The problems getting up-to-date and accurate numbers for COVID tests, deaths, ICU usage, etc., demonstrate this is not trivial.
"""

Not trivial, but also tinker toys. Industry-level authentication of RESTful services is a pattern that many of us on this list ought to be able to implement while skimming Instagram or playing online go. A small team of Friammers and/or a few interested parties could have something up in a month that would be considerably better than healthcare.gov or the New Mexico Unemployment app. Some on this list are pretty bright and could write or implement formal verification software<https://galois.com/research-development/software-correctness/> for proving the correctness of the code.

It is so easy to point to software that doesn't do as advertised that it is easy to miss out on what the present state of the art actually is. The anecdotal cases are click-bait. But hey, I have spilled enough ink on this subject already. Yes, we can have nice things.

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