ISIS Assistant Director
In March, ISIS will hold four important ZIMS meetings. The first meeting will focus on the User Interface (“UI,” otherwise known as “user-friendliness”) of ZIMS screens. As we move ahead in this new direction for ZIMS development we have a great opportunity to directly address some UI questions that have arisen during ZIMS testing.
Two more March meetings will center on database and architecture of ZIMS. These critical meetings will lay out a definitive framework for what in the existing ZIMS code will stay, be altered or be replaced. These two meetings will be based on the formal “code review” recently conducted by two outside experts from Microsoft and Altos. That review found that some of ZIMS architecture is of high quality, but also recommended some changes. Our new direction will make any changes far easier to implement.
The final meeting will be an overall project planning meeting in which deadlines and release dates for ZIMS Version 1 will be assessed. All of these details will be presented to the ISIS global community’s elected Board of Trustees for final approval in an April 11th board meeting. After that approval, we will be able to communicate it all to you.
Below are the participants for the March meetings:
Subject Matter Experts:
Jon Ballou Population Management, Taxonomy, Studbooks
Tracy Clippinger Animal Health
Duncan Bolton Animal Management
Jason Crichton Aquatic Animal Management, Environmental Monitoring
Tim Carpenter Aquatic Animal Management, Environmental Monitoring
Patricia K. Robbins Animal Health
Rachel Thompson Animal Health
Technical Experts:
Hassan Syed ISIS Assistant Director
Robert Erhardt Chief Technology Officer, The Zoological Society of San Diego
Paula Loring Simon Chief Technology Officer, Wildlife Conservation Society
Doug Verduzco ZIMS Chief Architect
Elisabeth Hunt ISIS Director of Training and Support
Seshu Durbaka ZIMS Technical Project Manager
Craig Yellick Consultant
Wenlei Fang ISIS Development Team Lead
Sonya Nederloe Documenter
At this writing we have 12 vendors who have responded to our Request for Information. Our team will review these proposals and will narrow the list to four by March 15. The criteria for vendor selection are:
· Organization size: not so big that ISIS does not matter to them; not so small that they are dependent on us - our project should not be more than 10% of their yearly revenue and should not be less than 2%.
· Quality of resources
· Ability to execute fast
· Transparency in project management
· Maturity of development processes and focus on quality
· Blended rate of standard resources
· Experience working with similar size project, company and technology as the ZIMS project.
We may decide to use more than one vendor to mitigate risk and because highly trained developers in the latest technology are hard to find. Having more than one vendor expands the talent pool.
As we have been telling the ISIS global community about the new direction for ZIMS, we have been met with overwhelming optimism and support. One ZIMS volunteer said that she breathed a sigh of relief when she heard about the new direction for ZIMS. We have a lot of serious work to do. None of us like that ZIMS will take longer than expected, but we are on a new road, and there is a great deal of new positive energy flowing into the ZIMS project.
