Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Intelligent Business Operations - a medical use case


Within the recent year Gartner promotes the term "Intelligent Business Operations" (IBO)  - not to confuse with Business Intelligence (BI).  Roy Schulte from Gartner wrote about "operational IQ".   I am looking now at the concepts and facilities of IBO, in Gartner's view.    One way to study it is by looking on a recent post by Jim Sinur (also from Gartner).  Jim provides a success story in the medical domain, resource allocation in surgeries.   The ingredients of this scenario are:



  1.  Simulation-based optimization of scheduling and resource allocation in off-line for all surgeries planned for the next day.
  2. Real-time tracking of everything: physicians, nurses, equipment; monitor of procedure duration and status - using sensors, cameras and in Jim's terminology - exploiting the "Internet of Things".
  3. Determination of things already going wrong (not according to plan) or expected deviations from plan
  4. Re-applying the simulation based optimization (this time online!) and get updated resource allocation plan.


This may be instance of the "detect-forecast-decide-act" pattern we have identified as the basis of proactive computing, although in Jim's scenario it can also be reactive (the deviation from plan already occurred - there is no need to forecast anything).     


I'll write more about the IBO concept and some additional ingredients of it soon.  
Since the term "intelligence" is now back in fashion,  it would be nice to have metrics for the IQ of some operational process like the surgery management.
2. 

No comments: