Marketing Committee

File:Sunset 218.jpg

Next Marketing meeting

The HL7 Marketing Committee’s primary responsibility is to develop a promotion and marketing strategy for increasing the visibility of HL7 and advancing HL7 Standards globally. The focus of the comittee activities is on the strategic aspects of marketing, not on day-to-day communications or PR issues.

Strategic Planning Task Force

The Strategic Planning Task Force is a special project which is focused on organizational strategy and process redesign for HL7’s future. The initiative began in August 2005 at the HL7 Board Retreat where a process for developing long-term plans was determined. Preliminary recommendations are expected in February 2006. The work of the Task Force has an overlap with the activities of the Marketing Committee. The activities of the Marketing Committee will be dormant (i.e. be carried out in the context of the Task Force) until a later point in time.

Products

• We could define V3 as being all RIM-derived, HDF based models, and specifications related to the transmission thereof. We probably want to market CDA separately from V3 messages though.
• Service specifications (e.g. CTS II) is another product line IMO, as are functional specifications (e.g. EHR, RLUS). The problem with service specifications is that they could be based on -or harmonized with- RIM models (but not necessarily so). In many (if not most, maybe even all?) cases, you can take a messaging or service based approach for the same business functionality. Which is more appropriate in which circumstances is still subjective, some more obvious than others.
  • When you look at interoperability from an abstract perspective, you have an endpoint that packages some information up and sends it (a message) to one or more other endpoints, possibly via some intermediary (transfomr,route), and often may do some location look up before it sends it. A similar process is repeated to get the response if there is one. That just about covers every type of integration I know. So at this level are services any different from messaging and are either really any different from one system reading or writing directly to another systems database? So in a sense there is a great deal of similarity. You can also apply the same kind of abstraction to the modeling methodology too and draw many parallels too.
  • One of the most obvious differences is in reuse of common behavior patterns and abstractions, which does not really arise from modeling focused on messaging. In SOA, you have services like Entity Identification (EIS), Retrieve, Update, Locate (RLUS) both in the current ballot, and other potential future ones: Order Management (for many kinds of order), Scheduling (all kinds of different resources) and so on. These simply do not arise out of modeling that is focused on messaging.
• We also have CCOW and Arden (currently branded as separate products), where do those fit into?

Marketing Plan

The main activity of the comittee is the creation of a HL7 Marketing Plan. The goal of this document is to set forth a promotion and marketing plan for increasing the visibility of the HL7 organizations and advancing HL7 standards globally.

The Marketing Plan describes many aspects, the following of which are contained in this Wiki:

• HL7 Mission
• Stakeholder Analysis
  • W3C Open Standards Community (situation analysis)
  • Wikipedia Collaborative Content Community (situation analysis)
  • Linux Open Source Community (situation analysis)
  • HL7 Open Standards Community (situation analysis)