On Mon, 9 May 2005, Greg Woodhouse wrote:
Again, VistA "is" both its conceptual content and its implemented "code base" that reflects a whole "architecture". It is given that the conceptual content will change as both basic science and clinical application change. The VistA Evolution Process must accomodate both dimensions. Many functions can use encapsulated functional components; what those components are and how they are used in the infrastructure are design decisions for the VistA architecture. Your comments below reflect that basic reality for VistA, or any other healthcare enterprise architecture. For the VistA Community the effort must be to see how to collaboratively build and share both the conceptual models and the implementation processes to the optimal extent.
Of course, that raises a more basic question. What *is* VistA? If you take the point of view that whatever sort of thing it is, it should remain viable for 100 years or more, then most likely, you don't anticipate much of what constitutes VistA being left (at least of the actual codebase). I think the presupposition of the first option is that VistA is the "stuff" that makes it up (i.e., actual lines of code, files, etc.) and it seems entirely reasonable to think that THAT will eventually become obsolete.
I've tried in the past to make the argument that the value of VistA resides not in the actual lines of code of which it consists, but in the body of knowledge and insight that went into creating it. But I have found that this is line of thinking that is usually rejected out of hand -- petrhaps because the community seems to have such an interest in preserving the existing code and functionality without looking forward at how what we've learned in building VistA can be put to use.
--- "K.S. Bhaskar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:Part of the problem is our cultural predisposition to equate old with
obsolete, inadequate, and useless. When were the standards established for screws? Yet, in this 21st century, I still count on going to the
hardware store and being able to purchase a screw that fits by looking at a bin labelled with the number of the thread standard.
The problem with VistA is not its age per se. It is a culture that doesn't plan for a process of refreshing and renewal. The question to ask for VistA (or any other major enterprise wide application) should
not be, "How long can we live with it and when will it be obsolete?" Rather it is, "How do we keep VistA viable for the next hundred years?" The VistA of a hundred years from now is guaranteed to look nothing
like the VistA of today, but there will have been a continuum of availability and useful service. Rome to us doesn't doesn't look anything like the way it looked to Julius Caesar, but there has been a Rome in continuous existence for over 2,000 years because no city planner said, "The city will be obsolete in ten years, and we'll just
raze it and replace it with a new city that has the latest [[insert hot buzzphrase]] in urban planning."
-- Bhaskar
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A practical man is a man who practices the errors of his forefathers. --Benjamin Disraeli ==== Greg Woodhouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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