Adrian Blakey gave an excellent talk yesterday at the IBM WebSphere Technical Exchange Conference in San Francisco. He talked about BirdDog, a wireless/pervasive emergency-room application that Kaiser developed using IBM and NetMesh technologies. Here are some of the highlights (paraphrased):

... in the third iteration of our project, we swapped our hack for a product: NetMesh ... big realization: sending contextual alerts, making the device "beep" with situational context solves the real use case ... what the doctors need is not just a web-browser pull application, but event-driven.

Using NetMesh enabled us to aggregate "always-on" information over 7 backend systems that is simply inspected by the user interface ... both browser and messaging client...

Methodology: 1) high-level information model, 2) write the probes, 3) add call backs when information changes, 4) reusable JSP tags inspect the model.

What we'd like to have is situational computing ... the pervasive device picks up the situation that the doctor is in and tells the doctor what they need to know ... a very different usage model from a traditional web application, but it makes much more business sense for our doctors...

We will try to incrementally build our BirdDog to the be doctor's pervasive helper ... will continue to partner with NetMesh for the productivity and innovation their products provide.

We are obviously very happy to have such a satisfied customer. It also illustrates clearly that the Situational Information Grid is a platform one level higher than today's typical software platforms, and is to be used in conjunction, not in competition, with what the customer has already.