ConCall-20070206

T3F - Transitional Technical Task Force

Tuesday Feb 06, 2007 12:00 PM (US Eastern Time, GMT -5)

Present

Beeler, Blobel, Buitendijk, Case, Lorenzi, McCaslin, McCay

Prior Homework

Review/update working items as:

Background

• Review description of Technical Directorate from Strategic Task Force Documentation (http://www.hl7.org/rwj/documentcenter/Strategic%20Initiatives%20Recommendations%207-26-06.doc)
• An alternative description which may be more relevant and up to date is posted under the Governance page at: http://www.hl7.org/documentcenter/public/wg/sito/SIIP%20Transition%20View%20of%20Org%20Model%20(3).doc

Working Documents

• Review of TD functions from Charlie McCay
• Summary of various "organization charts" assembled by Virginia Lorenzi (in PowerPoint)
• Beginning sketch of Organizational relations by Craig Parker (in png)

Accepted Agenda

1. (05 min) Roll Call & Accept agenda
2. (40 min) Technical Directorate Discussions

   (20 min) Aggregate and summarize TD responsibilities

   (20 min) Consider TD make-up and roles, including relationships to Board, CTO, TSC, and high-level groupings of TCs and SIGs

3. (10 min)Document list

Technical Directorate Discussions

Aggregate and summarize TD responsibilities

Several participants had amended function list that we seek to refine. Among the discussion points for this list is:

• What is the TD role in identifying, managing and/or defining products going forward?
  • Action: Ask the Products and Services SI group their view on this.
  • Agreed: The TD must have a role in accepting the Products it believes it can execute based on resources, architecture, coherency, etc.
  • Long-term, who will define Products?
• What is role of TD in re other tasks such as Education, PR, Marketing
• What is the relationship of the TD to Supporting tasks -- PMO, Publication, Electronic services, Tools, etc.?
• Note: Representation (voting or not) from the two above is essential to TD functioning

Consider TD make-up and roles

For this discussion we worked with a revised version (slide 1) of the preliminary chart created by Craig parker, and two if the charts (slides 2 & 3) prepared by Virginia Lorenzi. The discussion focused on slide1 with the following notes and actions:

1. Query: Do the COO and CTO report to Board or to the CEO (as indicated here)? Some of the SI material suggests that these report to the Board in parallel.
2. Discussion: Why is TSC in the middle of the path from TCs to TD?? This would appear to further separate the TCs and SIGs from the actions in the TD and Board. This discussion led to the following points.
3. Agreed: There should be an expectation that the Co-Chairs TCs and SIGs in each of the FT, SS and DE sub-groups will meet routinely to resolve issues between their groups. This implies ConCalls, and WGM face-to-face meetings. (In effect, there is one committee of co-chairs for each sub-group.)
4. Agreed: There will need to be two representatives of each sub-group available to participate in TD meetings.
   1. One of these would be the "primary" representative, and the other is an "alternate" who can attend and participate when the "primary" is unavailable. The "alternate" should Chair the Sub-group co-chairs meetings.
   2. Recommend an election process for the sub-group representatives to the TD that is similar to that used to select the T3F. Specifically, candidates must be a Co-Chairs of one of the committees in the sub-group. Votes for the primary and alternate delegate will be cast by each Committee or SIG in the sub-group.
5. Agreed: With the above meetings in place, then the TSC (all co-chairs of all TCs and SIGs) becomes a plenary or retreat style meeting, and the "TSC" is no longer needed as an "in-line" box.
6. Discussion: Should the six TD representatives of FT SS DE also convene periodically? We agreed that this will depend upon the strategies adopted for resolving issues and conflicts between and among TCs/SIGs. Certainly these six individuals must play a key role in these processes.

Next Steps

At the next meeting we agreed to continue advancing two documents in parallel:

1. The draft TD structure charts
   • Revise to reflect agreements in last this meeting
   • Begin to revise slide 2 based on these discussions
   • Visit rationale for selection of sub-groups (slide 3)
2. The list of TD responsibilities and relationships.
   • Reduce the number of "bullets" in each section to a few (2-4)
   • Clearly segregate and define the three sub-groupings of responsibilities
   • Begin to assign specific responsibilities to "boxes" on the charts