As the summer approaches, I’ve noticed that there’s a lot less traffic and buzz about industry trends. Of course, you have to expect this: The Spring show and conference season is winding down, people start thinking about vacations and the kids are out of school.  Another winter season has come and gone, and there have been little overall developments in the standards/data integration arena. Some may say, “Well, it’s just timing. People tend to put all of that stuff on the back burner during the Summer”.

I’m not so sure. Over the past few years, I’ve made some observations on why the standards/integration movement in the biosciences industry never seems to get off the ground. True, everyone agrees they’d like to see something come together, but there’s little overall organization and cohesiveness. Go to your favorite seminar, interest group or association, and getting a room full of people to agree on anything is like herding cats, never mind organizing anything on a larger regional or even national level.

Truth is, there is very little organization in the user community. Sure, there are lots of groups, associations and the like. But they’re not aligned. You’d nearly need everyone to agree on and establish a central governance body. Only then would you have some serious political clout to move and shake things. Most people seem to believe that you’d need to apply some major leverage on vendors and manufacturers to get them to adopt a standard, or commit to at least a more open architecture. I myself though this way for many years - Now, I’m not so sure.

Point in case: over the past year, while attending various shows, seminars and groups, I’ve noticed that people love to get together, and talk about the latest and best products, how to implement them, or resolve issues or problems. Of course, people also talk about their wish lists, with new feature sets, SaaS, with open standards usually being right at the top. There’s a lot of excitement, and conversations can get intense.

Intense until a vendor or manufacturer walks into the room. All of a sudden, there’s this collective “who invited you?” and immediately people withdraw. There seems to be an ingrained, inherent distrust or suspicion that takes hold. It’s as if people suddenly think “Ok, watch what you say…they might try to sell us something!”. There are a few forums I know that are so anti-vendor, that even the slightest commercial reference can get your removed. Of course, there have been abuses, so these kinds of cautions are warranted and justified to some extent, and groups and forums have user policies for good reason. And they apply to everyone.

Still, I find this phenomenon to be a bit baffling. On one hand, people get really exciting about a bit of software and want to learn all about it, but then they distrust the company that makes it. The trouble with this is that this can go both ways, and become self fulfilling. If a vendor or manufacture perceives this reaction, then they will tend to adopt an equally defensive posture. Given this, what motivation does a manufacturer or vendor have to what to work with the user community at large to even consider adopting an open standard?

In the medical industry, the financial drivers created by managed care and the market forced organizations to standardize. It was either adopt, or perish. Plain and simple. In the biosciences industry, you don’t have the same financial regulation, so vendors and manufacturers are not “required” to change. And why should they when they, as well as all the bioscience companies, continue to thrive even in our current economy.

Bioscience companies spend a lot of money on industry products – a single company can easily spend millions of dollars yearly. So clearly, no one wants to loose a customer like this! And being this kind of paying customer, you could have some influence. One things for sure in the biosciences industry – it’s intensely competitive, and getting more so very day. So, why is there the user-vendor reluctance to work on changes that could be mutually beneficial? Why the distrust?

An acquaintance of mine, who runs an Institute, states that a large number of problems encountered in labs have nothing to do with the science, technologies involved or the instruments. He feels the origin of these problems arise out of the business itself due to organization inefficiencies rather than technical shortcomings. In short, he’s referring to the human factor.

I couldn’t agree more. In many organizations that I have worked in or visited, there often are conflicts of some type between lab personnel, management, and information technology professionals. Those organizations that have close alignment between these groups tend to be the most efficient and successful.

How do these conflicts - the “us vs. them” mentality - originate? Can you think of one at your company? I’m sure you can…now can you recall how it started? Or was it always “just there” when you started working there? In the big picture, it really doesn’t matter how it starts. What matters most is how it can be resolved, and that we are willing to try.

So here’s a novel concept: if people started to work with vendors and manufacturers on a level playing field, and dropped their guard, I wonder if we might be surprised by the reaction they’d get. I’ll bet that most would be willing to at least talk. Talking is the most important, crucial step. Once that starts, everything else is possible. We might find that manufacturers and vendors are more than willing to cooperate with us, and give us what we want, perhaps in some middle ground. That certainly would be a whole lot better than where we are now.

Perhaps this sounds naïve, even pollyanna-ish. Well, something needs to give sooner or later. Someone has to hold out their hand for that first handshake. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, and this post, there needs to be leadership to start this. That’s the first step. The second step is willingness to work with the vendors and manufacturers and have a neutral playing field where the needs of both sides can be seen and understood. This process may take years. Perhaps longer. But we need to start thinking about it now.

Data Integration | Life Sciences IT | Biotechnology Trends

  Cisco’s UCS Virtual solution is the future. The ability to scale resources on demand without integrating additional hosts into a cluster gets us closer to the evitable mainframe configuration. The upper end limitations of UCS has changed the landscape of virtual infrastructures for scalability under one instance. Cisco will hold the temporary keys to this innovation while other virtualization companies catch up. For those upgrading to Cisco’s solution now this scalability will come at a price. Cisco will produce proprietary hardware solutions. It will take a while for other vendors to enable this functionality for commodity hardware. Adoption of Cisco’s UCS solution will likely struggle for the same reasons blade servers struggled shortly after their introduction; blades lacked a unified backplane standard. Purchasers of blade solutions were locked into the same vendor once the blade chassis was purchased. Due to this lock in choice was removed when the need to add resources arose. Cisco’s customers are now in the same boat.  At the current high price point cost alone may slow adoption enough to allow other virtualization vendors a chance to close the gap on the commodity resource problem. Cisco has the vision right and is on the right path, with proper execution they could own a very large share of the market if their competitors cannot solve technical hurdles in the near future.

 Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time in scientific labs and on drug manufacturing floors.  One of the common trends that I’ve noticed is the desire of the scientific community to get their work done.  This desire often stems from both personal work ethic and the time sensitive nature of the research many life science companies are performing.  While this work ethic is typically the type of mentality you’d love in an employee it makes life science companies vulnerable to issues arising from a lack of (or slow) communication; especially when that communication has to cross functional and departmental lines.

One of the most effective and successful solutions that MUSA has come up with is a communication model that enforces regular meetings with both the scientific stakeholders and those in IT.  Using this model a partnership between the scientific community and IT is formed, helping everyone get on the same page.  During meetings scientific team members are tasked with updating their IT counterparts with feedback from their colleagues.  This feedback should include, but not be limited to:  plans for purchasing and installing new instrumentation (since most has an IT component), need for additional capabilities that’s often met by rolling out new software packages, upcoming initiatives that may require a spike in IT services (storage, processing power, etc), and so on.

By ensuring that communication lanes stay open, the scientific community can benefit from having IT assist in evaluating new products and ensure that the proper resources are in place before they’re needed.  This results in a more stable environment and less headache over time.  In turn, IT team members should be updating their scientific colleagues on any work being planned that may have an impact on tasks being carried out in the labs or on the manufacturing floor.  Experiments and drug lot production often run for long periods of time and can be extremely sensitive to even small blips in service availability.

By implementing this type of Scientific IT team, MUSA has helped many of our clients realize a significant improvement in communication between the IT and scientific communities.  Improved communication in turn results in a more proactive approach to overall technology strategy in the labs, and leads to improved productivity and decreased time to market.  When products can get to marker quicker the entire organization becomes more profitable, and what’s more fun than that?