We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones.  -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Software development can be expensive, and health information systems are notorious for their cost. Even open source options require a considerable investment in configuration and maintenance. As a result, people responsible for managing these systems often tend to treat the code artifacts (classes, routines, DDL) from which they are built as valuable assets in their own right. On one level, this makes sense, because they are tangible and have a measurable cost. Systems, on the other hand, are emergent phenomena, and their value is much harder to quantify. On the other hand, there are significant dangers in focusing on code artifacts to the exclusion of larger systems. It can…