Perspectives on Transitioning ISIS Leadership

by Nate Flesness
ISIS Executive Director

I’ll be turning 62 this January, one of several indicators that it’s time for some transitions, and time for me to decide how I can best contribute now. I feel the entire community should take real pride in the unique worldwide ISIS network we are building together. Achieving cooperation on this scale is an uncommon thing in human affairs. People from institutions worldwide have come together to build a global ISIS network for a multitude of reasons including: many zoological animals or their ancestors originate from far away, we need to track their movements among institutions internationally, we need overview information on all ex situ populations for planning, and our collection management system needs are shared.

I have been in the ISIS leadership position for a long time. When I joined, ISIS was 5 years old, I was half of the staff, we had troubles making payroll, and ISIS had 85 members in 5 countries. The ISIS network has grown for these past 29 years, continues to expand at a rapid rate, and is now fast approaching 800 member institutions in 76 countries. ISIS is by far the world’s largest zoological membership organization. There have been many challenges along the way, but they have been overcome, with help from many of you. There are challenges now too, but they will also be overcome.

As ISIS has grown, and particularly with the many challenges encountered in the very large scale and pioneering ZIMS project, my daily work has moved away from my backgrounds in population biology, zoological data, and zoological software development. With ISIS’ expansion, ISIS’ chief executive must focus increasingly on organizational development and management. That person must support the ISIS Board for policy development, and manage state-of-the-art IT as it is applied to complex biological disciplines. That person needs to continue building stronger partnerships with multiple zoo and aquarium and professional associations worldwide, and relationships with external organizations. That person must manage marketing, capital campaigns, contracts, communications, budgets, bankers and bridge loans, human resource policies, and so on. These are all essential duties, but I have missed not being able to contribute more from my areas of expertise.

With these facts in mind, the ISIS Board’s Executive Committee and I agree that ISIS will now best be served by new executive leadership, bringing new skills to lead ISIS forward in a new time. We have also agreed that I can make further contributions to ISIS in a new role which utilizes my experience with ISIS and my training as a population biologist. Therefore I will be stepping aside as ISIS Executive Director, and I will assume a different and supporting role as ISIS Director of Science. I have been lucky to have helped to develop the ISIS community to this point, building a wonderful circle of colleagues and friends worldwide. I am totally committed to supporting my successor and the future of this unique service network.

I look forward to the transfer of ISIS organizational leadership to the new executive director and am enthusiastic about the opportunity to focus full-time on integrating the science of the many zoo and aquarium disciplines, to help deliver on the promise of ZIMS, as well as the promises we have made to the community. Also, I won’t mind having a little time for some long-postponed vacations….

Many thanks,

Nate

The Six Reasons ZIMS is Taking So Long

by Nate Flesness
ISIS Executive Director


I want to answer the biggest question right now: “Why is ZIMS taking so long?” Blog posts are supposed to be short and pithy, and this is a little longer, but if you take the three and a half minutes to read this all the way through, you’ll understand everything you need to know to answer the biggest question about ZIMS.

The answer is short: because ZIMS is complex. But ZIMS is not just complex; it is hugely complex. Why? Six reasons – and only one is IT-technical. The others spring from the way our zoo and aquarium business works.

1. ZIMS is pioneering. No one has ever done this before. The zoo and aquarium community articulated what it needs: software that delivers an integrated specimen (or group) record on the web, in real-time. That record needs to be maintained by subsequent holders of that specimen (or group), including the veterinary (health) data. It was only through developing ZIMS and seeking external funding that that we discovered no one anywhere has built a system like this. We will get the job done; it just takes longer when you are pioneering. We learned a great deal from the ZIMS alpha effort - admittedly with some pain, but that’s one way to learn. Now we are moving forward again, and when ZIMS is released, every ISIS institution will become a leader in information technology.

2. The IT- Technical reason: All software projects declare that the underlying architecture is critical, but most do not actually build it correctly. Like building a house, you can build software fast and cheap by not investing in the highest quality components. These are the houses that end up costing far more in repairs later. ISIS is choosing to do this job right, using an advanced architecture to make sure ZIMS is solid and less expensive to improve and maintain into the future. By “maintain” we mean creating new versions, fixing bugs and generating new functionality as zoos’ and aquariums’ business needs change over time. We are making sure that our investors (you), our members (you) and our end-users (you) get a quality product that will be as inexpensive as possible far into the future. The up-front investment in quality pays off down the road. So we are demanding much-higher-than-usual quality in the underlying architecture and program code. To reach this high quality standard, ISIS itself must develop the system and code templates, as well as overall quality standards, provide them to the vendor, and very actively monitor work and delivery at a fine level of detail.

3. ZIMS must serve the largest to smallest institutions’ needs. The range of ISIS member annual budgets is from less than $100,000 to more than $100 million. Some want and can manage greatly detailed animal records; others use only the most basic information. Add in that animals move internationally, often tracing their history and their pedigrees back through many institutions worldwide, and you arrive at a ZIMS (and an ISIS) that needs to think and function across a vast spectrum, including across national boundaries. Actually, language translation is a relatively small challenge. The alpha effort of ZIMS was translated into Japanese and Spanish in about a week. The far greater challenge is designing a single ZIMS to work well simultaneously for both very small and very large institutions that have different needs and often different ways of managing their collections.

4. ZIMS will serve aquariums. This is the first broad community effort to build a standard system for managing complex life support systems, sophisticated tracking of groups, and detailed monitoring and management of the water in aquarium tanks.

5. Remarkably complex software needs to be remarkably easy to use. The ZIMS alpha effort taught us that 500 expert volunteers contribute lots of valuable ideas but those ideas must be made into ZIMS screens by professional User Interface designers. This is how consistent, user-friendly, efficient screens are born. (As part of our current pilot project, professionals have developed several new User Interface design concepts this summer, and we will show you some samples soon!)

6. ZIMS establishes a ten-fold expansion in data standards. A huge, instantly accessible database of unstandardized data is not useful. Many intensive community-driven data standards workshops determined that ZIMS would establish about 300 standards, up from about 30 used previously. It is another challenge to make these powerful new data standards (such as SNOMED) easy to use.

So the ZIMS vision is big. But the vision is not pie-in-the-sky; it is exceedingly practical. ZIMS is about addressing practical, modern realities for our business. It’s about saving time on data entry and records management, getting permits, efficiently assembling studbooks, and the thousands of little tasks that, made more efficient, will save hours of work for institution staff every day. It’s about gaining exponentially quicker access to information that can save animals’ lives. All of this translates directly to saving money and supporting zoos and aquariums doing a better job caring for animals and sustaining living collections for the long-term.

These goals are all absolutely worth working for, even if it takes longer than we all hoped. ZIMS will get done, and it is worth the wait.