How Will ZIMS Change?

Nate Flesness,
ISIS Executive Director

We’re hearing two questions right now about ZIMS. Understandably, a few have asked “Is ZIMS dead?” We are living Mark Twain’s answer (“reports of our death are greatly exaggerated”)…If you walked by any of the offices at ISIS right now, you’d know that the answer is unequivocally NO.


We have an incredible amount of consultant, volunteer and staff skill and energy pouring into planning the final stage of ZIMS development, and money in the bank to deliver ZIMS. An intense month of planning meetings in San Diego, Atlanta and Minneapolis have just been completed, laying out a new work plan to be presented to the ISIS board on April 11. As several zoo directors have said to me recently: ZIMS feels finally "unstuck" and is moving forward again. They are right. The news of transition to a new vendor can be unsettling, but there is no doubt in my mind that ZIMS is going to be delivered faster and better - now more than ever.

The other important question is being asked by the many hundreds of people who have been part of the global collaboration to design ZIMS, and by the hundreds more who have seen ZIMS at conferences or on the ISIS web site. Their question is: “How will ZIMS change?”

For the vast majority of ZIMS users, what will matter more than anything else is “user friendliness” or what software people call “User Interface” (UI). There is probably no better way to show the sense of optimism pervading the ISIS office right now about ZIMS than to talk about UI.

Below are two examples of the ZIMS “Animal Details” screen. The first is the existing ZIMS screen; the second is a proposed idea by a new UI professional ISIS hired to consult on design improvements. Both screens accomplish the same tasks.




As you can see, the second screen (below) makes the user feel more immediately ready to begin entering data. It’s friendlier and more logical, and that goes a long way in software.


Please don’t take away from this blog post that this is the new look of ZIMS. It’s not – it's one of several suggestion we will be evaluating.

What I hope you will take away is this: ZIMS has been an incredible, unprecedented project. It began with a global collaboration unseen and untried before: 500 zoological professionals from many countries pouring their ideas and hopes into the common cooking pot, followed by years (yes, too many years) of assembling these many ideas into the various early “builds” of ZIMS that many of you have seen and explored. While anyone would hope that a project this huge in vision would move quickly to a simple and happy conclusion, that has not been our luck. But right now, because of bold decisions made, we have the opportunity to refine ZIMS well beyond the merely “acceptable,” and to drive toward the extraordinary. We have engaged experts in UI, as well as several other more highly technical areas of software design to help ISIS continue distilling the massive amount of ideas and good will poured into ZIMS, filtering them down into a friendly, powerful, extremely useful product for the ISIS global membership.

ZIMS is, indeed, unstuck, moving faster than ever, and in the right direction.