The Books I Read in 2021: Part 3
In 2021, I started a new job as the manager of the front-end reporting team on the electronic health records implementation programme at Guy's and St Thomas'. This was my first time managing a team, and my first time working on a programme rather than in a business-as-usual role. I was both excited, but also anxious - and so my usual coping mechanism of buying books kicked in!
Now, a year after our go-live, I want to look back at some of the books I read at the time, and what I took from them.
- Title: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (Learning to Learn)
- Author: Richard W. Hamming
- Publication Date: 1996
- How did I hear about it: A post on Hacker News.
This book contains a passage which has stayed with me:
Company managers always seem to have the idea that if only they knew the current state of the company in every detail, then they could manage things better. So nothing will do but they must have a database of all the company’s activities, always up to the moment. […] suppose you and I are both VPs of a company, and for a Monday morning meeting we want exactly the same figures. You get yours from a program run on a Friday afternoon, while I, being wiser, and knowing over the weekend much information comes in from the outlying branches, wait until Sunday night and prepare mine. Clearly there could be significant differences in our two reports, even though we both used the same program to prepare them! That is simply intolerable in practice. Furthermore, the most important reports and decisions should not be time-sensitive to up-to-the-minute data! [my bold]
Things have moved on since 1996, and report users are much more literate to the benefits and pitfalls of live data. Live data improves hospital processes in countless ways, when placed into the hands of the colleagues who care for patients directly. But Hamming’s “company managers” still need slower, digested, curated information for management decision-making - and that’s a useful distinction to keep in mind.