Felker C 02 2018. Epic contract services (and the Lego metaphor) parts 1 + 2 This is the text of a post that was published on a proprietary user 'blog' [4] at The UCSD Health approach to contract models, maintenance and testing has a service oriented architecture SOA. Applying design thinking, we have found the Lego block [1] metaphor powerful to explain this work. As with any analogy, the parallels only go so far, but with Lego blocks, we recognise four positive salient characteristics — and four negative ones — that serve to illustrate both the power as well as the drawbacks of SOA to any audience [2]. These ideas are sourced originally from a project management and IT company in McLean VA - Dovel Technologies. They would be fun to work with. Lego blocks are interoperable. Because the blocks all have standard bumps, any Lego block will fit into any other Lego block. Standards-based interfaces are the secret to the blocks’ interoperability. Lego blocks are unbreakable. The Lego Group designed them with significant robustness in mind. And that’s what we want from SOA — a design for robustness. Lego blocks are composable. The whole point to the toy is taking many of them and assembling them to meet the need of the day, just as the business wishes to compose contract services into applications that implement business processes in a flexible way. Lego blocks are reusable. On the one hand, you can build one structure with your blocks, then disassemble it and reuse the blocks to build something else. Another way of looking at reusability is to consider the colors of the blocks. If you consider, say, all red blocks to represent customer information contract services, for example, then you can easily use red blocks in many different structures, just as you can compose customer information Services into many business processes. The UCSD Health approach to contract models, maintenance and testing has a service oriented architecture SOA. Applying design thinking, we have found the Lego block [1] metaphor powerful to explain this work. Lego blocks’ strengths pose business challenges for their manufacturer. Once a family buys enough Lego blocks for their first child, they’re usually set for life, regardless of how many children they subsequently add. As a result, sales of Lego blocks have waned over time, leading the company to roll out special kits with the intention of having children assemble a castle or a spaceship …once, and set it on a shelf. In other words, the vendors talks about interoperability and reusability, but really wants … you … to keep buying products from them. Structures built from Lego blocks are only so strong. The larger you build a structure with Lego blocks, however, the more fragile it gets. In other words, loose coupling comes at a price. While tightly coupled interfaces reduce flexibility and reusability, they also can increase efficiency. Loose coupling, on the other hand, can limit the efficiency of the implementation. Lego blocks are interoperable with each other, but not with other kinds of toys. This characteristic of Lego blocks might provide a warning about the pros and cons of building on a single platform, but the more interesting story here is that loose coupling occurs on multiple levels. You can have loosely coupled interactions on the hyperspace and text build tools levels, and still be tightly coupled on the semantic level. Lego blocks are for children, but children couldn’t build Legoland. … To build the large structures you find in the Legoland theme park (near San Diego in Carlsbad by the way!), you need architecture. Without architecture, a box of Lego blocks is nothing more than a box of toys, and without architecture, a bunch of contract services is little more than, well, a bunch of services. Only with a broad design and the discipline to follow it can companies expect to get the full value out of their services over time. …Fine-grained services by themselves aren’t particularly valuable to UCSD Health, but contract services can also be so coarse-grained that they’re too inflexible to meet our needs. The optimal granularity for contract services generally falls somewhere in the middle … It makes sense for [our] organization to build a mix of contract services at different levels of granularity. Using the Epic provided contracts matrix, the Alexandria reporting tool and some standardised data analysis methodologies, UC San Diego has translated many aspects of contract builds, testing and maintenance to a lego - like operations process and repository. The UC Health system is comprised of medical centers in 5 (five) locations: San Diego (where I am), San Francisco, Davis, Los Angeles, Irvine, Riverside. The system depends for its structural administrative integrity on the Office of the president which sponsors the UC student health plan, and fosters combined analytics and financial reporting. As a state supported system dedicated to efficiencies in planning and coordination, budgeting and effective dealings with government and private health care payers, the system apportions administrative governance functions. Important in UC context is application of subsidiarity in our complex, multi tiered organization. Campus tiers and the Office of the President tiers have common understandings, priorities and methods of working together [3]. References 1 Dovel Technologies. Lego model of SOA, last visited 2018 01 25 2 Lego. last visited 2018 01 25 History of lego. last visited 2018 01 25 Lego is a line of plastic construction toys that are manufactured by The Lego Group, a privately held company based in Billund, Denmark. The company's flagship product, Lego, consists of colourful interlocking plastic bricks. Lego pieces can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct objects. Anything constructed can then be taken apart again, and the pieces used to make other objects LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group of companies which does not sponsor, authorize or endorse this content. 3 2013.12 C Judson King. On the apportionment of administrative governance functions within multi campus universities and university systems. University of California, Berkeley. Center for Studies in Higher Education. Research and Occasional Paper Series 16.13 last visited 2018 01 25 4 Glossary of blogging last accessed 2018 04 03. This is ISO 5127 3.1.8.21 specialized communication professional communication technical communication expert communication human communication (3.1.8.04) involving specialized knowledge (3.1.1.17) created or required for solving a particular task or problem and taking place in the defined social areas of science, technology, industry, economics, or law and concerning predominantly those who are dealing with that task or problem.