Efficiency and Simplicity

So, for the second time in less than a week I had the opportunity to use the Capital Health Region's medical services.  Last week I spent three hours in a medicentre waiting room to see a doctor for three minutes.  I would have gone to another medicentre but this was the only one that was open in a 10km radius that I could find.

On Sunday I witnessed the response to a 911 call and was pleasantly surprised at the rapidity with which the response came.  911 answered the call before I was even sure that the phone had wrung and when I was forwarded to the ambulance dispatch, the ambulance was already en route to the house.  How did they do this?  Effective use of technology.

Not just "the use of technology", because, quite honestly, sometimes technology makes this worse instead of better.  Not because the technology is not helpful, but because of the complications in using the technology or the poor implementation of the technology.  The luggage handling fiasco at the Denver Airport is one such example of how technology can be beneficial (the concept was sound and the potential payoff tremendous) but if implemented poorly the result is millions of dollars of effort wasted and, in the long run, a return to manual labour.

When I called 911 they had the reverse lookup available for them so that they knew the phone number I was calling from and the address associated with that phone number.  They had me confirm the information in order to ensure that the records they had were correct and up to date. The rest of the conversation was spent getting details of the incident so that they could be transmitted to the EMTs who were in the ambulance in order to prepare them.  The information that the dispatcher entered into the system was immediately available to the EMTs.

While we try to build our systems to take into account all of the potential problems and all of the potential solutions, we need to keep in mind that there is a very specific task we need to accomplish and that we should focus on getting that task completed in the most efficient manner possible. Not the most elegant manner and not the most all-encompassing manner, but the most efficient.  While you may not be writing an application that is designed to help save lives, that doesn't mean that the concepts - efficiency and simplicity - are not applicable to what you are doing.