Hello From India!

By Doug Verduzco
ZIMS Chief Architect

We have completed the first week of the six-week pilot project with A-1 Technologies. The purpose of this pilot is to test the working relationship and the new methodology ISIS has proposed for completing ZIMS. We’ve gotten used to saying that ISIS is a unique client and ZIMS is a highly unusual and complex application, but I'm telling you, whenever we begin talking about what ZIMS needs to do and what ISIS has done for 34 years, people’s eyes grow big - they’ve never seen anything like this!

This week was all about familiarizing the A-1 team with ISIS, the zoological world, the ZIMS project, and the technical architecture that the ISIS team has envisioned for ZIMS. Eight ISIS team members delivered the orientation, including Nate, Hassan, Elisabeth, Wenlei, Craig, Rich, Kim, and myself, and this took all week. We hit them with a lot of information. They asked a lot of great questions, and the week went very well.

Over the next several weeks, as we get down to creating some ZIMS screens, we will determine if A-1 is a good fit to complete the ZIMS project over the long haul. We all hope this will work, but ISIS is being careful to make sure that this relationship works for our needs.

It’s been a hectic week, and getting eight people from Minnesota to Gurgaon involves a great deal of logistics. This is part of what we are testing too with this six-week pilot, because part of what makes this project unique is that ISIS will have its own people present throughout this process. Those ISIS people may be developers from the ISIS office or Subject Matter Experts from our community. So over the next year, ISIS will be racking up a lot of frequent flier miles for a lot of people!

So far, it’s not been without its headaches (or stomach-aches!) but for ZIMS to be delivered with the exceptional quality and complexity that our community needs, this is how the job needs to be done.

(We have been able to have a little fun:)