Working transparently

It’s vital that we are open and transparent about our work in reviewing and setting technical standards. Our work is much more than a dry and dusty catalogue of standards but instead we must work in partnership, with colleagues across health and care within Wales, but also with external partners.

I envisage open technical standards as the loosely-coupled connections between our data and computing services and applications, and so by extension, also help to define the connections between our teams.

You can now see and contribute to our work-in-progress in different ways:

• You can read about on this site - via less formal blog posts like this, as well as the upcoming “standards” pages that will catalogue existing and new technical standards for Wales.

• You can follow our meetings, via our public agendas and minutes.

• You can review our kanban boards, hosted at github.com.

• You can contact me or one of the team.

I’ve divided our work into several workstreams. I think of these workstreams as fluid and adaptable, lightweight so that they can adapt to our changing requirements. They’re just envelopes, but align to tangible outcomes that underpin providing a truly seamless health and care service; for example, a seamless service is surely dependent on a single authoritative source of demographic and core communication preferences/needs information for patients and carers.

It’s important to recognise that these workstreams are aligned to business domains, not arbitrary technical domains. That’s because those workstreams are focused on solving user needs.

Within each workstream are standards for well-defined products, such as patient identity standards. These should be regarded as more long-lived than our workstreams, although cycles of review, deprecation and adoption for all standards will, of course, be necessary over time.

Mark