2022-05-11 Meeting notes

Date

11 May 2022

Agenda

• Antitrust Statement and approval of minutes

• CIECA Simplified

• CAPIS avatar

• CONNEX

  • Marketing

• Marketing Strategic Plan

  • Onboarding, Member, Board and Committee Engagement

• May agenda:

• CAPIS Avatar Contest – share entries

• CIECA’s Marketing Strategy: new member engagement

• CIECA CONNEX Conference – attract more business analysts/CTOs

Meeting Minutes

• The antitrust agreement was read and the minutes were approved.

• CIECA Simplified: Paul discussed the CIECA Simplified project. One of the primary objectives this year is to improve member engagement, which leads to committee and board engagement. The goal is to make the CIECA products more usable and understandable. Once a new member joins, he or she is often perplexed about how to use BMS and ultimately utilizes EMS. Therefore, Paul has initiated the CIECA Simplified project and he and Paulette are working to simplify the CIECA Standards. Paul said that the standards must be usable by members with a wide range of IT capabilities, especially for smaller companies looking at how to implement them. The BMS is a huge resource with no step-by-step instructions. This is a challenge. Melissa asked what EMS and BMS stand for. EMS is Estimate Management System and BMS is Business Message Suite. EMS was designed to do one thing-export estimates. All services are included in the BMS. Part of the CIECA Simplified project is to use terminology that is understandable and standard in the industry and developers are familiar with.

  • Assignment Add is a great tool for developers who can see what it will look like in the BMS. Paulette provided an overview of how the information is organized. The goal is to simplify CIECA Standards for users and take them through the process of how to build the Standards.

  • Melissa shared the idea of having an explainer guide or ROI template that can shared with the senior leadership team at a company. Rick and Chad were very impressed with the project. Chad asked if it was going to be worked on section by section. Paul said that one is going be chose, eg Assigned Services, and then when that is full designed, other services will be updated. Chad liked the idea of replicating for the other sections. He suggested asking members to share feedback on a webinar. We told the the committee that we will be doing that during the April CIECAST Webinar. Paulette said that she and Paul are putting together information on how to talk to trading partners who haven’t built webservices to help send them in the right direction.

• CONNEX: Paul shared information about the CONNEX Conference, which will take place in September. The conference originally catered to developers. Over the last several years, it became more of a business conference. With the new API Standards being created, the goal is to have the presentations balanced between technical and business. In the past, the technical and business presentations were split into two rooms. We are planning to have one agenda this year that appeals to both a technical and business audience. it’s a great opportunity to get everyone in one room together. We are looking for speakers who have an understanding of the current business issues and how technology integrations play a role. Rick was supportive of the idea of having one meeting with both IT and business representatives. Paul would like to have more business analysts and project managers attend the conference.

  • Marketing ideas: Melissa suggested having a tradeshow component of the conference. Paul said we are going to start small and have a “tradeshow light” component. The committee was invited to share additional marketing ideas.

• CAPIS avatar: Paulette explained that about a month ago, the Architecture Committee suggested creating a unique avatar that we could use for the CIECA API Standards initiative. Paul had suggested having a contest to invite the industry/members to create an avatar. Typically, developers create an avatar when they are working on a project, eg in GitHub. We talked about targeting developers to create the avatar, which might help encourage them to get involved in CIECA. The committee was in agreement.

• Other: Chad mentioned that he spoke to John at the CONNEX conference and he had offered to make it available for free to CIECA. Chad will send over the information to look over.

• Marketing Strategic Plan: No update at this time.

Great meeting!

Up Next

• Antitrust Agreement and Meeting minutes acceptance

Action items

Decisions