According to my neighbor, who is a woman, next week is the season premier for “Desperate Hot-wives”—her words, not mine. My wife refers to my little brain hiccups as Roemer-minutes, a little hitch in my git-along where the thinking part of my brain briefly vacations in the fifth dimension. Speaking of the fifth dimension, the dimension, not the sixties rock group, I was reading up on it the other day. There’s this professor of theoretical physics from Harvard, Lisa Randall, who happens to look a little like Marcia Cross who portrays Bree Van De kamp—actually she looks more like Jodi Foster. See how quickly this all ties together? Anyway, Dr. Randall has developed a theory about how the universe is warped—something many of us expected. According to her model, the reason gravity appears so weak is that the universe is actually warped by a hidden fifth dimension—must be why we haven’t seen it, because it’s hidden—and our gravity is just the leftovers from the dark side.

For the inherently curious, in mathematical terms her equation is, ds2=dr2+e-kr(dxm dxn hmn). That was helpful, wasn’t it? Here’s where it gets complicated. People in Europe will are testing the Large Hadron Collider to look for gravitons, theoretical particles of gravity. The collider smashes protons into one another, and if these theoretical particles appear then disappear that somehow proves the theory. However, and depending whether you’re a glass half-full or a glass half-empty kind of person, this is a rather big however, we could all die. This is where the distinctions between the meanings of the words possible and probable become rather important.

According to this whole other branch of physics, something quite unpleasant could happen, the creation of doomsday phenomena, including microscopic black holes that would grow instantaneously and swallow the earth, and strangelets that could transform the earth into a dead dense lump. Could it happen? Yes. Will it? Probably not. So there you have it.

Where does that leave us? Assuming that it does, leave us, that is, alive, it makes the notion of implementing EHR seem just a tad more simplistic. At least we won’t be creating any black holes. So, set your phasers for stun and let us begin again. To implement EHR in your organization you need a champion, a sponsor. Someone who isn’t afraid to say, ‘follow me’. As we said before, this type of project does not lend well to the notion of ‘add three cups of technology and stir’. The champion is needed not so much for figuring out the shape of things to come, but for their ability to cause those things to be implemented within the organization. This person should have ready access to resources, dollars, and the ear of someone very senior in your firm. Next time we’ll begin to take a look at the champion’s role.