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Subject: RE: [emergency-if] EDXL-AT & Situational Awareness
Rex, Not a problem - thanks for the clarification. My intention was not to cause grief - you have been instrumental, with a few others, in a lot of work that has been accomplished by the committee and I just wanted to make sure we were all on the same page and the SMEs do not read this email in the wrong way, as I did. I agree in that we need to learn lessons and recognize that some of the work may be more time consuming than what we, or others, expect. I guess we should start with the assumption that a task will take a good amount of work, whatever shape the requirements are in. Thanks Sukumar -----Original Message----- From: Rex Brooks [mailto:rexb@starbourne.com] Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 3:38 PM To: Sukumar Dwarkanath; Timothy Grapes; Rex Brooks; tgrapes@evotechinc.com; emergency-msg@lists.oasis-open.org; emergency-if@lists.oasis-open.org Subject: RE: [emergency-if] EDXL-AT & Situational Awareness My apologies Sukumar, I misspoke on that. My thinking was colored by the fact that, I believe the work had been described as having been developed over a fairly long period of time and was in a more advanced state of development that, if I recall correctly, was described as not needing as thorough-going, from-scratch an approach or effort on our part. However, that is not what I would characterize as a candidate specification, so I gladly stand corrected. I also intended no disparagement of SMEs, per se, as long as they don't assume, or are not expected or required to assume that their expertise extends to areas where it is, in fact, not appropriate. I agree we absolutely MUST work with SMEs, and my comments may have gotten out of bounds. As I said, I stand corrected. I have been reviewing some decidedly worrisome efforts by extremely well-intentioned and extremely well-qualified groups in areas where none of us can afford to allow processes and approaches that are not well founded to be carried forward into specifications, especially in the areas of health and emergency management, where poor reality testing, poor conceptual methodology and poor follow-through can, in fact, harm us all. That definitely is coloring my thinking lately, and the fact that these efforts are two and three and five years along a path that is proving problematic is downright depressing. My intent was to remind us that we need to make sure we learn our lessons well, and being persuaded that a completely necessary piece of work may in fact be submitted to us with an expectation that we can complete our task of building a workable specification with it in less time than we are usually able to do this because it has been heavily worked on by experts is not something I think is advisable. The problem is in the "expectation of less time due to expert input." My secondary point is that we should also be keen to learn from our experience and devise ways in which we can reasonably expect to improve our work product and perhaps lessen the time needed to complete our tasks. Sorry, Rex At 2:05 PM -0400 3/19/07, Sukumar Dwarkanath wrote: > >> EDXL-HAVE, in my opinion, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that >accepting >>candidate specifications by groups of SMEs is almost always >a mistake. SMEs rarely >>fully understand how broad, yet rigorous, the >specification-writing process needs to be. > >>> We have now had to PAINFULLY deal with the consequences of being >persuaded that >>the SMEs know their area best and that means they are >the best group to write a >>specification for that area, instead of >carefully working through a rigorous requirements-writing process. > > >Rex: > >I am not sure how you characterize a candidate specification but >EDXL-HAVE was submitted in the format that the EM TC requested - as a >requirements specification - and not as a candidate specification. > >As I see it, the practitioners/SMEs do know their area best - I do not >believe that will change - we should recognize this and work with the >practitioners to leverage their domain expertise. > > > >Sukumar -- Rex Brooks President, CEO Starbourne Communications Design GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison Berkeley, CA 94702 Tel: 510-849-2309
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