STK Health | Life-Changing Technology

Work with a Purpose

For us in STK is not about a job, it's a responsibility

Thinking from the future back helps you challenge the conventions of today. What next ?

Supporting our business and ensuring we have high performing technologies at hand, developing new solutions and technologies, and building qualitative data and insights to drive innovations for our healthcare customers and business are our key responsibilities. We can help you to address fundamental business problems such as:

i) Agility and adaptability of business processes and systems: Facilitate designing of agile business processes and flexible systems based on reusable patterns of information. This will help automate the alignment between business processes and information systems, speed development of systems to support new products and distribution channels, and accelerate process and systems integration when businesses integrate either horizontally or vertically, or reinvent themselves in their product markets.
ii) Integration and coordination of information: Coordinate integration of information and processes across supply chains, enterprises, and databases. Accelerate the design of Service-Oriented Architecture.
iii) Reduce the time to market new concepts: Accelerate formulation of functional requirements and process models based on prefabricated reusable patterns
iv) Compress the time to develop prototypes: Develop patterns that can be the basis for early prototypes when iterative prototyping methodologies are used for developing or integrating information systems or business processes.

Ultimately this vision is about change. It means technology for automating change and the best practices for facilitating it -all in support of the innovation and adaptation necessary for corporations to remain competitive in the diverse and tumultuous business universe of today.

Components of Knowledge

Components and the Nature of Reality

Engineers build complex machinery. Architects build complex facilities. Both build large and complex things from simple parts. They are familiar with techniques that divide and conquer complexity. They know that complex things must be made from simple ones.
Small and simple components must be first tested and assembled into sub-assemblies, which in turn should be retested and assembled into even more complex components. These then might fit into yet larger components, and so on, until the end product is finally assembled.

Knowledge (meaning) is not replicated in the natural world (i.e., is normalized), whereas in today’s information systems, it may be fragmented and replicated.
In present-day systems, irreducible facts (those that cannot be broken into simpler assertions without losing information), the basic building blocks of knowledge, may be replicated and un-synchronized in different applications, in requirements recorded in different forms, in design artifacts, in databases 'help' files, and in deliverables, so much so that it is sometimes unrecognizable as the same root knowledge.

Therein lies the problem. To reflect knowledge in our artifacts, as it exists in the real world, we must first understand reality, and how reality structures meaning and information.

The Universal Perspective

What Is Perspective? We understand the world around us by experiencing its behavior. We seek its meaning by forming concepts of what behavior is shared by what objects, and what is special to each. These concepts are based on our individual experiences and perceptions. Not only are our experiences and perceptions different, but also two people will never think exactly alike. Therefore our concepts (i.e., generalizations of what is shared and what is special), are naturally different.

Widely shared ideas about business and reality underpin our perceptions, and because of these widely shared ideas, it is possible to define universal classes of objects that encapsulate shared knowledge.
These universal object classes anchor knowledge firmly and coherently from every possible business perspective. They are a pattern -a standard perspective that other perspectives can add to. It subsumes them all.

We need this Universal Perspective because it integrates. It is the ultimate integrator because it unmasks universal meanings —meanings shared, used, and reused at the heart of business —and the shared understanding that drives it. Thus, it is the ultimate tool for integration of perspectives, processes, and systems.

A Vision of the Future

Our vision, the Knowledge Processor (the paradigm at the end of a fully automated repository of meaning, created from knowledge artifacts) shall be automatic and adaptive. Its currency is business meaning, adapting to changing rules by configuring the meanings in its repository to match new requirements with new behavior and new polymorphisms.
It creates new meanings from old in response to new rules and requirements. It seeks and changes its goals in response to changes in its environment; goals are also meanings.

This way, meanings can be forged from meanings. We would be able to carve, constrain, sculpt, and join meanings, which are normalized patterns of abstract information, to create even more meanings.
The Metamodel of Knowledge forges the rules, and the Universal Perspective is the conduit for substance. Together, they create the abstract pattern at the heart of the Knowledge Processor.

Thus, components of the Knowledge Processor can be made by the Knowledge Processor from its own components, and may be assembled by the same components. These components are meanings (i.e., patterns of abstract information) which not only create the ever-expanding ensemble of knowledge, but also forge its growing and numberless components as the ensemble expands.

Is All About Change

The Nature of Change

Change is a risky business, and must be made judiciously. It must be sponsored to mitigate even larger threats looming on the horizon or to seize strategic opportunities. In this age of intense competition and rapid innovation, these threats are an increasing phenomenon.
Opportunities and threats will force the pace even if we do not. One must be the first to see and grasp opportunity from the confluence of process, technology, and above all, innovation, in order to prosper and sometimes even to survive.
Managing risk is therefore too important a topic to ignore. To help charting a plausible course of action the organizations might focus on these basic parameters:

i) The Technology Dimension: New methods, processes, tools, and techniques will be required to support any approach and organizations must be realigned around these new processes.
The agility of the business process or information system will be measured by its ability to provide high quality business solutions in reduced time frames, and at reduced cost.
ii) The Process Dimension: Effective and economical reuse of knowledge artifacts in the organizations can only occur if multiple projects and initiatives reuse the same artifacts, which are repositories of shared knowledge.
Few organizations have this capability at present, and the large majority is far removed from this level of process maturity and technological sophistication.
iii) The People Dimension: Experience has shown that the cycle of emotions, from the initiation of change to its conclusion (successful or not), follows a predictable path. It is this cycle we must learn to navigate, because your success as a change maker depends on it.

Managing Emotions from Change

Change will only succeed if there is a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo, assuming the decision is made on fundamental changes to the way an organization operates, and the way it develops the processes and information systems.
It is process, governance, and goals that must change, but people also must commit to them, implement them, and execute the change.

Without people, change will not happen, and change makes people anxious. It might also make them curious or hopeful. When it does not, it will make them fearful, apathetic, despondent, or frustrated.
The primary focus of any change initiative must be on people, and must be vested in people. Only then will change be fruitful.

It calls for communication, clarification, commitment, and participation at every step of the journey, from conception to fruition of change. It is a road map that cannot emphasize this aspect of change more.
The message is to focus on people, every step along your way. Make them hopeful, curious, committed, inspired, and excited.

Governance of Change

Change is difficult, both emotionally and operationally. It is even harder to keep changing. People like stability. Change sows insecurity and discomfort. It also sows risk. However, learning drives the knowledge economy. It demands that we keep changing. It requires, on the pain of extinction, that the constancy of stability be replaced by the constancy of change and rapid evolution. This is a kind of constancy, in which the search for opportunity, and the response to change, is constant.

Change requires new systems and processes that will stabilize the capability to constantly learn, change, improve, invent, and evolve. To do this, the organization must develop a kind of emotional and operational resilience that is rare in most present-day organizations, and the larger the organization is, the harder it is to change

It is not possible to change our paradigms in one grand, quantum jump. We must evolve, step by measured step, towards a business paradigm that replaces the value of stability with the value of change; the constancy of operation with the constancy of resilience and responsiveness; and the stability of unchanging information systems with the constancy of agile, resilient, responsive, and robust information systems.

By developing and keeping Organizational Capability will help us evolve to the state where we can effectively use Knowledge Artifacts to build and deploy robust and resilient business processes and information systems.
More and more, today's reality demands unprecedented resilience and agility of our businesses, our operations, and our information systems. Knowledge Artifacts support the technology of resilience.

Work with a Purpose