Report on proposed solutions to Dossia Foundation’s web portal development
The Dossia foundation project has been experiencing setbacks since its inception and major changes need to be made in its implementation to ensure its success. This proposal seeks to make propositions that can be adopted to enhance the success of the project.
Executive Summary
This proposal has the following recommendations to counter the issues affecting Dossia foundation:
- Production of a web portal capable of handling millions of users and the relevant applications and architectures to be used for sharing information with business partners.
- Partnering with medical groups and insurance companies.
- Building on the real existing work that has already been achieved
- Making the web portal customizable to each a stakeholder’s needs to avoid the conflict interests.
Dossia’s proposed web portal will have the capacity to fully engage, increase and retain customers in line with each stakeholder’s goal. For this to happen, its web portal must be structured using the right architecture. The architecture will be server-centric; this means a lot of the logic will be handled within the browser on the clients side (Backbase 10).
Business partnerships
To support the Dossia Project certain partnerships have to be made. Partnership deals will open for business. This will serve to provide the much-needed capital to sustain the project.
Insurance companies should be sought for business partnership for the project. This is because they are key players in the health care industry and would ensure that the project is able to access their databases and combine their resources with other partners’ resources to enable the achievement of the foundations’ objectives.
Large medical groups like Permanente medical group, Bellevue hospital centre and others would form potentially beneficial business partnerships with the foundation in the project. This is because they offer services which would directly make use of the web portal to be developed and thus would enhance health care provision at reduced costs.
Enterprise applications
Before applications on the portal are developed, security will be given top priority. Users will only have access to those applications and contents that they are authorized for. Ideally, it should be developed such that they only have to remember one login (single sign-on) (Tatnall 836). The applications on Dossia foundation’s web-portal will serve to make access to health care relatively easy and cheap. In addition, they will facilitate sharing of information among partners. Suitable applications that should be used are:
- Open ID: This will enable shared identity with ecosystem partners across the websites. In addition it will create a single sign on user experience for all Dossia enabled applications.
- Oauth: This allows for secure API authorization. The Oauth protocol will be used to authenticate all applications accessing Dossia API services (Tatnall 840).
- Dossia API- this will allow client applications to securely read and update a Dossia partcipant’s health care data (Backbase 10).
Partnership with Indivo
It would not be beneficial to any party in the partnership to let go of Indivo as the software development partner. This is because despite the past failures, Indivo must have obtained essential experience and a much needed closer look at the needs that will need to be met by the web portal. They can easily make improvements on what they have developed to bring out a better end product and thus save the whole venture financial resources which would be required in case of using a completely new partner for the same purpose.
Letting go of Indivo would pose a potential threat of a lawsuit which would only work to derail the project. Such drawbacks would highly jeopardize the successful completion of the project in time and would increase the likelihood of a failure of the project as a whole.
The lack of business objectivity and understanding of complexities by Indivo can be solved by introducing a new division to the company to deal with such issues and therefore enable the development of technically viable products which also meet the business objectives of the project.
Potential conflicts of interest
Potential conflict of interests among founding companies, the vendors, the insurers and potential users of the system will arise. The business objectives of the partners may not conform, there may exist a sense of competition among companies and continued support for the project by some of the partners may not be in the best interests of their business objective of profitability. To avert these potential conflicts Dossia’s web portal should be single purpose. Use of the web portal to be developed should only be for the purpose of making access of comprehensive important healthcare data to stakeholders at reduced cost. The portal should not be used by any stakeholder to gain undue business advantage and should be governed by certain rules and guidelines of engagement agreed upon by all stakeholders.
To further reduce potential conflict of interest, information technology can be used to ensure that only registered participants should be allowed to use Dossia’s web Portal applications, applications should be prohibited from storing user identities and passwords and all applications should be required to disclose to the end user how the applications will use the user’s data. All applications on the Dossia web portal should be subject to an annual external audit to assure of its proper functioning.
Business problem and the proposed solution
The continued support for the Dossia foundation’s web portal project may not be viable if strategic changes are not made in the implementation of the project. The partners already committed to the project may incur huge losses if the project fails, both financially and otherwise. The solution to this would be to re-evaluate the project, identify the causes of its failures and take measures to change its course to be more business objectives. Strategic partnerships with other companies and institutions, adoption of the most appropriate web portal architecture, use of the enterprise applications recommended earlier and the continued partnership with Indivo will in part assist in solving the problem (Tatnall 856).
Reasons for implementation of the solution
The solution should be implemented because it is one of the ways that will ensure that the partnership retains some of the members who would otherwise opt out of the project. It will also assist in ensuring that the cost of the project does not spiral out of control and thus ensure the business viability of the project. The solution should be implemented so as to attract potential stakeholders into business partnership with the founding companies on the project, further strengthening it financially. The reputation of the project will also increase and this will ensure future success of the portal when it is fully developed.
Implementation of the solution
The solution should be implemented in-house. Since there is no suggestion of use of third parties, the parties already involved should be tasked with making the necessary changes in the project implementation. Responsibilities should be reassigned to reflect more on the specialist abilities of each party to ensure that the web portal developed is technically superior while at the same time maintaining business viability.
This proposal should be approved because it offers an opportunity to make the project more business objective, reduce potential future costs and losses, attract new business partners and ensure delivery a web portal that is technically sound and viable businesswise.
Works cited
BackBase, . "Creating a Successful Web Portal." www.Back Base.com, 03 february 2009. Web. 21 Mar 2011. <http://www.backbase.com/portal_software/tour/#portal-management>.
Tatnall, Arthur. Encyclopedia of Portal Technologies and Applications, Volume1. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc (IGI), 2007. Print.
