Templates WG SWOT

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis for the Templates Workgroup

December 12, 2013

What are the strengths of your workgroup?

• Small, congenial core membership
• Experiences around definition and use of templates for many years in international projects
• Knowledge of templates of various governance groups
• Implementation experiences using templates with various vendors
• Experience designing templates within various Standards Development Organizations
• Experience with various template design and management tools
• Good links and cross membership with SD and PC, CDS, Tooling

What are the weaknesses of your workgroup?

• Limited technical and administrative resources, leading to:
  • Difficulty in synchronizing different and sometimes conflicting requirements
  • Difficulty in meeting time requirements to coordinate among stakeholders and participate in governance groups

What opportunities do you see that can be addressed by your workgroup?

• Increased interest in templates, registries, repositories, versioning and interoperable template definitions and exchange
• Improve interoperability between CDA Templates and PHIR Profiles
• Extend template management and governance experience to incorporate all best practices

What obstacles or threats to progress have you identified?

• Cost of participation in working group meetings and HL7 membership, especially as government funding is reduced
• Within HL7 a wide variety of options for expressing and defining templates exists
• Versioning applies to many artifacts and creates confusion when extrapolated to templates
• Underdeveloped change control / sustainability / managing change over time for templates (and other artifacts)

Further information about SWOT

A short introduction to S.W.O.T. can be found at [[1]]