Internet…cont…

With Internet oriented technologies growing in sophistication and stability throughout the late 90s, the prospect of new ways of using software developed. The most significant was the ASP. In general, the Application Services Provider is an online software delivery company that will rent you software that you can use online on a monthly basis. The breadth of software is amazing and the vast majority of successful ASPs provide very particular business to business software like inventory management or supply chain management software. ASPs for human services are still in their infancy however, but beginning to emerge in the same areas that the applications development process took, i.e, donor management, scheduling, volunteer management. ASP technology on the other hand is really the forefront of technology development and the Internet is fast becoming the operating system of the world. ASP technologies enable developers to build applications which use the infrastructure of the Internet to develop applications which then can run either on the net or in intranet situations. ASP technologies include languages like HTML which is what drives web pages, XML, JAVA, ASP.NET, C#, and others.

The value in these technologies comes though the ability to build online applications that can then deal with issues of geographic distribution. It enables disparate organizations to use the same application even though they are across town or across the world. This used to be the case with client server systems, dumb terminals networked into a mainframe system, i.e., very expensive big business and government systems. The Internet and these modern technologies bring the power of mainframe systems to the average user and have revolutionized business. The rise of e-commerce is a direct result of these technologies.

But these technologies are shells in that they don’t have content nor define content. Content is the king in an information age of course, so even with all these fantastic technologies hooked into a global infrastructure we still don’t have a unified human services infrastructure that we can use to gain a comprehensive picture of the social dynamics of our communities. Two things are needed:

1. Framework technologies that can adapt to many different kinds of social services agencies and enable each organizations to function through the features the framework can be configured to handle;

2. a set of standards that are agreed for comparative analysis.

On point one, a number of companies have discovered this approach and are now beginning to make inroads into government and community and on point 2 little is being achieved yet and is where I propose the Bio-Socio-Economic Health Model.