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Posted in Blog on October 08, 2010 by George Wilgram
My interest group, Boston LIMS/LI, recently held a meeting in conjunction with the local chapter of the Association of Laboratory Managers (ALMA). We opted for a panel presentation format, and invited representatives from LabWare, Rescentris, Velquest and Accelrys – all leaders in the LIMS and ELN space, to speak. Each vendor was allowed to present on a topic, which was “Future Directions in Laboratory Informatics”. After the panelist’s presentations were finished, the meeting was then opened for discussion. Throughout the meeting, some commonalities in the presentations emerged, some of which were expected, some unexpected, and represent a viewpoint that is surprisingly not far from what end users typically express.
Among the common themes, the most evident demonstrated the trend towards more efficient collaboration. As LIMS and ELN evolve, they are becoming true enterprise systems that need to transcend bench level processes and data handling. These systems are taking on a critical role in the organization, becoming a core scientific platform, unifying both internal groups as well as with external partner organizations.
By unify, I mean that the trend is towards a platform that handles all aspects of information interactions, from data acquisition, management, information exchange and notification, to analytics and decision making. In essence, these systems are evolving into “hybrid ERP” like systems that define and run the business and provide a single channel to view the entire organizations scientific activities and data. There’s also the implication that workflows and processes would need to be assessed, identified, defined and standardized in order for everything to work efficiently. In some organizations, where internal organizational structures can be highly silo’d, implementing global workflows and practices could be a real challenge. But done correctly, the efficiency gains would be enormous.
This direction has been described as a “holistic” or “convergent” vision that leverages a wide range of technologies, and impacts and reaches into every avenue of the organization. Such a vision has some positive and negative connotations. For example, a strength of a holistic solution is that it’s one system to implement and support, one vendor, etc. On the other hand, this type of solution can be seen as limiting, in terms of innovation and flexibility to adapt to the ever changing needs and demands of research. Therefore, these solutions must also be inherently adaptable, flexible and modular, both in design and function.
This collaboration theme also carries over into another area all the vendors addressed: data acquisition and format standardization. A major obstacle for many informatics solutions is dealing with all the data formats found in labs, many of which are vendor proprietary. So it was refreshing to hear that vendors themselves see this as an area which needs to challenged. In the last statement, by vendors, I mean informatics vendors and not instrument vendors. Informatics vendors are pretty much in the same camp as scientists in terms of wanting standardized data formats. Easy access to the data obviously makes their solutions more effective. The desire to see data standards emerge is really targeted at the instrument vendors, which to date, who haven’t given any indication of embracing such an effort.
Data standards have long been the holy grail in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. There’s has been a lot of debate and demand for a data standard to be developed that would make the holistic concept above much more of a reality. But a comment was made about data standards that came as a revelation: a standard would be great to have, but having one could also have a negative impact on innovation. Having a standard would mean that products would have to comply with the limits of the standard, and therefore, unique solutions would not be encouraged. Perhaps the best solution is to have many standards which better fit the needs of specific scientific methods. More on this later.
Another area that all the vendors agreed on (and this came as a bit of a surprise) was that of customer involvement. In other words, they felt that customer involvement was critical to shape the evolution of informatics solutions. Specifically, they mentioned that customers need to be more vocal about what they want, provide better specifications and requirements.
This appears to be somewhat contradictory however. Most scientific organizations are, of course, geared for science, rather than business analysis, so are often ill equipped to be a strong voice in terms of asking vendors to work with them to meet their needs. Vendors wouldn’t always understand how a particular business operates, are frequently biased in favor of their product, and tend to be protective of their technology. Hence, there is often a wide understanding gap between vendors and companies, usually filled with misperception, in my opinion.
This issue was discussed at length during the meeting, with no clear conclusion, suffice it to say that a bridge needs to be built between vendors (informatics as well as instrument vendors) which would allow each to understand each other better. Overall, from a high level, it still is refreshing to hear at least informatics vendors having this discussion. In general, the direction of these systems is driven by how people and organizations want to optimally work together. Informatics can become part of that quest. The defining concept is collaboration - how people, and not just systems, work and share information.
If you look deeper into this concept, much of the success or failure of informatics solutions may depend on the collaboration between the scientific organizations, and the vendors that create solutions. How will the “bridge” between the two be built? What will it look like? Can it happen at all? It’s very difficult to say.
Another way to look at this is to ask “Who will drive the direction of informatics in the future?”. Will it be the vendors? End users? As mentioned above, who will get end users and vendors to collaborate? Right now, it would seem that competition in the market place is driving informatics forward, in response to what the industry overall seems to be demanding. This is pretty nebulous and vague, and each vendor is left to it’s self to come up with solutions and approaches it thinks is best.
Perhaps this isn’t bad. Research and development in this industry is by nature and ever changing landscape. It’s very possible that a singular approach will never take hold because this would limit discovery. Discovery may always require a multitude of approaches, technologies, and standards. The tool bag may always need to be large in order to stay adaptable.
In conclusion, the meeting introduced a number of exciting concepts and ideas – and it also introduced as many questions. Perhaps one of these questions will become the topic of the next Boston LIMS/LI, where it can discussed in greater detail.
If you would like more information about the Boston LIMS/LI group, please feel free to email me at gwilgram@musatechnology.com
Posted in Blog on May 28, 2010 by George Wilgram
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.
Posted in Blog on May 27, 2010 by Douglas Lantigua
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.
Tags virtualization
Posted in Blog on May 25, 2010 by Josh Campbell
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.
Tags scientific IT, Project Management, life sciences IT, technology consulting, Biotechnology Trends, Life Sciences IT
Posted in Blog on May 12, 2010 by George Wilgram
MUSA recently attended the 2010 BIO-IT convention in Boston, as well as the BIO International convention in Chicago. As an exhibitor, we were of course interested in how some of our newest services and solutions would be received. At the same time, we wanted to gain a broader experience and understanding of some of the trends going on in the industry right now, and how these trends are being addressed.
As a lab specialist, I was particularly interested to see the latest developments in data integration solutions. At BIO-IT, I wasn’t disappointed – there were a number of vendors that had offerings in this area. On one hand, this was very encouraging to see. Data integration technologies are really beginning to emerge and gain ground, in response to a growing call from the scientific communities for tools and solutions that will help them work with their data.
Posted in Blog on March 04, 2010 by Puneet Lakhi
Companies of all sizes at some point look to outsource at least part of their technology support primarily to allow their existing staff to focus more on the business’s core competencies rather than day-to-day IT issues. Because daily support issues can be time consuming and require a great deal of time and attention, companies look to third party managed service providers who specialize in technology support issues. While it sometimes makes sense to bring in a third party technical resource for a small project, working with a managed service provider is usually a long term relationship, which means it’s important to do your homework to make to choose the right one for you.
First of all, it’s important to outline out what services you are looking for, and what kind of support you need. There are some firms that offer 24/7 support, while others only offer support during regular business hours. Also, it is important to know whether you will need the firm to send consultants to your site or if you would like them to work by tapping into your systems remotely to help you with your technology concerns. Most managed services providers work in a way where you can contact them through email or over the phone and they will respond in whatever mode is best suited for the job, including remotely accessing your network to support the issue.
Tags Outsourcing, virtualization, Project Management, Managed, Service, Provider, Managed Service Provider
Posted in Blog on February 23, 2010 by George Wilgram
One of the challenges faced by scientists working in biotechnology and pharmaceutical labs is the issue of data integration. Walk through any lab, and you are likely to see a wide array of instruments. Each instrument usually has its own data file format, which is often proprietary. This forces lab scientists to manually sort through and compile data from each instrument, typically using Excel, to achieve a final data set. Excel then becomes their de facto “standard” for working with, sharing, and presenting data.
While this is a workable solution, it’s tremendously inefficient in terms of time and resources, and prone to human error. In some cases, the time lost due to the manual work, and/or errors can mean delays of days, even weeks. This is hardly a new phenomenon. This problem has plagued the industry for years, and efforts to address this problem in analytical lab environments have lagged far behind other industries. For example, the medical device industry has long established data interchange standards and devices with compatible data outputs.
Posted in Blog on February 12, 2010 by Douglas Lantigua
Tips on Successfully Outsourcing Technology Support
There are four primary reasons why a business or organization should (domestically) outsource any portion of its IT services and technology management:
1. Reduce and control operating costs
Tags virtualization, technology consulting, domestic outsourcing, managed services
Posted in Blog on February 05, 2010 by Puneet Lakhi
Cloud computing, although it seems to have become the latest buzzword in technology today, has always been a vaguely defined term. The cloud is referred to as a metaphor for the internet, so the most referred to definition of cloud computing has to do with using “virtual servers available over the internet.” (InfoWorld ) The definition is very vague and up in the air primarily because cloud computing is such a new and developing idea. However, simpler forms of cloud computing have been around for a long time, and chances are you’ve already used it in some form or another. It also appears that cloud computing is gaining in prominence, and is likely to become the most valuable trend in IT of 2010.
One common example of simpler forms of cloud computing that have been around for a while already are Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Gmail. The emails and data you access through these services are not stored locally on your computer, but on a server or network your browser accesses over the internet. Thus, your files are not on your local computer, but in fact somewhere on the cloud, and are accessed by your interface software, the browser. Traditional concerns with cloud computing have been about security, but according to James Deoulakis of GlassHouse Technologies, “the security concerns have been reasonably addressed through encryption and other techniques... Cloud services providers have been refining techniques to reduce latency and protect data more efficiently, meaning that their offerings will become more attractive to other users.” (CRN.com )
Tags Cloud, Computing, Cloud Computing, Security
Posted in Blog on January 29, 2010 by Douglas Lantigua
There are several techniques available to provide reliable Disaster Recovery and Business Continuance for companies, but before you can chart a path you must recognize that it is the nature of your business that will dictate your DR/BC requirements. Typically the business will tell you that your application or service can never go offline. That is, until you are presented with the cost of a 100% uptime scenario. Enterprise environments should be armed with a cheat sheet for business units to understand what they are asking for and how much it will impact the budget. If your IT department is in a chargeback model, the argument becomes simpler. Companies whose business requests and requirements become IT problems and budget busters need to be better armed with information.
Most companies do not start planning DR/BC initiatives early enough. It is far easier to implement a plan early (and then build upon that original plan) than it is to implement a new plan after you have hundreds of servers over multiple geographic locations. There are several techniques to determine which applications and services require special attention, and most are dictated by the business. However, since IT provides the core services that enable access to these business essentials, there’s a cascade of dependencies which also need to be accounted for. For example, it really wouldn’t matter if the ERP system was up and running if the end users couldn’t authenticate or locate the ERP system on the network. When mapping out the business-critical applications and services, make sure to design a highly resilient supporting infrastructure that is easy to maintain and keep in alignment with business and DR/BC goals.
Tags life sciences IT, business continuance, planning, technology consulting, domestic outsourcing
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