Archive for March 2013

Learning to develope cCBT support software

As the use of Information Technology resources continue being developed to allow every industry on the planet to operate more and more efficiently the education or collective knowledge required to effectively create useful software or business support systems grows with an equally fine tuned and focus.  It’s amazing to look back even 13 years ago where if you had a primitive understanding of HTML and could piece together a couple pages online that resembled a catalog listing products, prices and contact information to allow the viewer a means of ordering the listed products offline then you were generating revenue.  A couple years before that I and most everyone I knew at the time were in amazed with having access to simple services like Geocities and Hotmail.  Capitalism and Information Technology have been a happy couple every since those days which brings me closer to the topic at hand.

Amazing things happen at that long lost place we used to call the bleeding edge.  One used to be able to hang out there if you exercised a relatively sharp IT skill set and weren’t afraid to try something new. All you had to do was grab someone with a sharp industry specific skill set and collaborate to summon what I lazily categorized as business efficiency software.  Just make some business process more efficient or more cost effective then smile and watch that edge you’re on bleed.

Snapping back in to reality now – it’s 2013 and you can still create more efficient business support software and systems with just a healthy IT skill set and a solid drive to make things happen.  But, to find the bleeding edge and create something awesome in today’s market requires an amazing amount of skill in business, effective collaboration skills, an amazing capacity to communicate ideas across knowledge or language barriers and of course it’s all ideally based on a solid foundation of IT skills and experience.  I see a lot of stress put on individual personal capacity within the movers and shakers of today’s functional business class.  The results produced by people with the drive and capacity to absorb and create are nothing short of amazing and it’s those results that have aloud all of us to further close previous barriers and gaps making this world a very small place if you overlook the distance walking to Mc Donalds and let the Dominoes delivery parrot tell you a story while updating you as to the status of the materialization and delivery of your pizza. lol.

I’m partnered and working with Randee Van Ness, CEO of Think Smart, Inc and a Certified Cognitive Behavioral Specialist amongst an impressive list of educational achievements.  Randee created, grew and saw through to the successful exit of a local medical practice offering Cognitive Behavioral Therapy programs combined with nutritional counseling with an optional food delivery program.  The focus for us now and the big picture for Think Smart, Inc. is to modify the local business model she designed, enhance the CBT service programs to cover a larger range of health issues while restructuring the delivery to make  the services available online nation wide.  As you could imagine the integration with and development of the web based support software and systems makes use of a lot of technology further complicated by the sensitivity of the data and the need for everything to support the CBT model of fact-based results-driven change.  This means everything must not only be infinitely secure, exchange vast amounts of data of every type from static text and images to live, crystal clear video and audio, log all the data and technically demonstrate change within each individual case and comparatively across all.  It needs to do all this without coming across as complicated, better yet – it needs to be appealing in it’s use from the consumers perspective.

The whole topic is yet again made more entertaining by the fact that the idea hasn’t really grabbed hold in the US leaving a couple small companies (two of which don’t offer cCBT in English) to even get an idea of the playing field from. ^_^

I’m on it.!.  Lets make something epic!