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.

The ZIMS Database

By Rich Langree,
Sql Server DBA

Hassan wrote in his last post about the positive discussions last week in San Diego around UI –User Interface – the way ZIMS looks and feels to the user (see his post from March 13).

I’d like to briefly mention the discussions in San Diego that focused on the ZIMS database. A database is pretty much any pool of information that can be searched by a computer and deliver answers to search requests. In the world of hi-tech, database architecture has to be one of the geekiest areas. I’ve been working on database design for 20 years, and it is difficult to explain in everyday language.

What I think is important to the ISIS community is this: a group of database experts and I have been working on ZIMS database issues now for months now. The large vision underlying ZIMS – all the world’s zoological data in one searchable web library – makes for a complex database because of all the different ways our community asks questions of the database and retrieves information. I anticipate that when it is up and running the ZIMS database will be among the most complex and technically advanced databases yet designed.

Those of us who have been spending time creating the ZIMS database have developed diverse ideas about what can make it work best – meaning FAST. I am pleased to report that the intensive discussions on the ZIMS database last week have resulted in agreement within the ISIS team regarding the plan to refine its design – to make significant improvements in the way it is managed and to simplify how it works. These refinements will take a couple of months to implement. In the end we will have a much faster and more stable database. As the intricate work on finishing all the code for the many ZIMS pages moves along in the next few months, it will be great to know that the larger database changes are already completed.

There’s a lot of good news to report as ZIMS moves fast in its new direction, and this is just one piece of it.

Exciting Possibilities

By Hassan Syed
ISIS Assistant Director

On a personal note, I cannot tell you how exciting it is to see ZIMS leap into action after so much time spent on other things. As I write this I am on my way home from a two-day meeting in San Diego with about a dozen technical experts and subject matter experts. The focus of the meeting was UI – user interface, or what non-technical people call user-friendliness. UI is the experience that people have as they navigate through the software. To a large extent, UI is about how people feel emotionally when they are using a software. And since however people feel about ZIMS is how they will feel about ISIS, we certainly have a great motivation to make ZIMS very user-friendly !

ZIMS is a huge and powerful program and one of the great challenges is to make it not overwhelm the user. The final ZIMS work plan we are developing includes adopting new technology that will allow ZIMS to display menus in ways that are specific to each kind of user. This means registrars will see a slightly different ZIMS than veterinarians, and aquarists will see what they need to see, and no one will need to see extra menus, fields or boxes they don’t need to see. One main point of discussion these last two days is how to improve the design of ZIMS to accomplish this great new approach to ZIMS. I feel very excited about the possibilities!

Along with the technical experts ISIS has already engaged (see ZIMSblog from March 5) we have also brought in these expert consultants to help ZIMS move along on its new course (In alphabetical order):

Faiyaz Alam is a Senior Consultant focusing on vendor selection and management for the new direction in the ZIMS project. He lives in New Delhi, India, and speaks English, Hindi and Urdu.

Ed Morrison, a senior consultant with Microsoft Corporation for over ten years, and at several other major tech firms for 15 years previously, recently conducted an assessment of the ZIMS database design for performance considerations. He continues on the ZIMS project to offer his expertise on overall ZIMS architecture and design especially the critical area of “BI” (Business Integration) – making sure the application does exactly what our community needs it to do.

William (Rod) Pickard joined the ZIMS project in February 2008 as a consulting application architect. Rod is a senior consultant from Magenic (http://www.magenic.com/) and has been designing cutting edge solutions using Microsoft technologies for over 17 years.

Peg Ratcliff, a User Experience expert from Magenic, joined the ZIMS project in February 2008 as a consultant to perform a User Experience Assessment and develop a prototype of suggestions for improving that experience. Wrangling complex work processes into highly useable software is her specialty.

Nury Sword has spent his last 11 years on MS SQL Server starting from version 6.5, involving database design, analysis, development, performance tuning and administration, He also has hands-on experience in Visual Basic programming as well as .NET programming. In all these capacities he serves as a consultant on the ZIMS project.

Craig Yellick is consulting company Alto’s vice president and senior analyst and is assisting with the architecture and design of ZIMS. Craig is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) with certifications in numerous development tools and SQL Server as well as the core operating system certifications. He is also a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). Craig’s most recent project involved designing a commercial clinical application for tracking and tracing of implantable human tissues in hospitals. It’s a unique application in that it is based within a SharePoint Portal. Microsoft did a video interview with Craig about this application; you can see it at https://www.obacentral.com/solutiondetails.aspx?solutionid=80. Craig is providing high-level code reviews and recommendations for improving ZIMS programming.

New Experts at ISIS

Hassan Syed,
ISIS Assistant Director



Things are moving swiftly as ISIS moves in a new direction with ZIMS. We have hired four exceptional new technical experts.

Doug Verduzco started working on the ZIMS project at its beginnings - in July 2001 for AZA. He facilitated multiple working sessions with subject matter experts to develop the initial data standards and the conceptual data model. Later, he developed the scoping-level requirements included with the original RFP. (In other words helped to define how big ZIMS would need to be to serve ISIS members). In 2004, he began to work with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to lead their adoption of ZIMS. He worked with subject matter experts to develop pre-ZIMS and post-ZIMS animal management and healthcare processes and their application conversion requirements. In 2007, he began working with ISIS on the ZIMS Retooling effort. Doug is leading the business side of this final phase of ZIMS development. Doug lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and three children.

Seshu Durbaka joined the ZIMS project as Technical Project Manager in early February 2008. He is a PMP certified .Net project manager with 15 years of experience managing a portfolio of .Net projects, Pre-sales, vendor management, product evaluation, Business Analysis (in USA and UK) , technical workshops and presentations (in Denmark and Singapore), multisite development with different time zones (Denmark- New Jersey- India), and onsite – offshore projects (Morristown, USA – Madras, India). In other words he has exactly the kind of global experience that the final phase of ZIMS development needs. Seshu has managed teams of up to 28 professionals in application development projects and 8 director-level team leads in a matrixed project. In addition to application development projects, he delivered assignments in Disaster recovery, Database upgrades, Migration, ERP implementations and a product in Delphi for the American automobile industry. He is a certified Microsoft Navision ERP professional. He is coming back to Twin Cities after completing a multimillion dollar project in November 2007. He hails originally from Andhra Pradesh, India, and speaks English, Telugu, Hindi and Tamil. Seshu and his wife have three young children.

Manish Verma is a new ZIMS Developer. He was born in Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, and is brand new to Minnesota, so we are all assuring him that eventually the ice does melt. Manish’s development experience is in healthcare, banking and finance. He speaks English, Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit. Of course he also speaks .Net, XML, ASP, JavaScript, and PL/SQL. He’s newly married. Congratulations, Manish!

Rachel Thompson, DVM, the new ISIS Veterinarian in Residence (part-time…we share her with the Minnesota Zoo), did her undergraduate work at Missouri State, and attended the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She moved back to Minnesota in January from northern California after being the associate veterinarian at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. She shares her life currently with a very high maintenance Labrador retriever.