Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS Corporation

Some years ago I was working in a large petrochemical laboratory in Texas. I sat in my office and bragged to my friends of my unfettered view of the ocean. While they imagined palm trees and umbrella drinks, what I actually saw from my office window was a cluttered waterway leading to a bay that opened up to the Gulf of Mexico. There were no beaches, no parasailing, and few boats with the exception of the monotonous string of tankers passing by. The facility I worked in was so sundrenched that a single tree offered the only shade in the parking lot. On one of my first days on site, I celebrated my good fortune in seeing that the parking space beneath the lonely tree was inexplicably vacant, so I zoomed into the space, locked my car, and smiled all the way to my office.

A rookie mistake.

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Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS Corporation

The Dawn of LIMS in the early 80’s featured crude character-cell applications with a few fundamental features, one of which was sample tracking. It’s an oldie but a goodie, because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good your data-crunching, work list management, reporting, and data acquisition are if you can’t find the samples.  An offshoot of that basic sample tracking functionality of yesteryear is sample  Chain of Custody (COC), a feature most people overlook as so mundane that we have long since taken it for granted.

Who cares?

Ryan Braun, Lance Armstrong, O.J. Simpson, and a cast of thousands, that’s who.

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Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS Corporation

An old business partner of mine always used to sprinkle the following quote into a conversation a couple times a year.

“A company is most profitable just before it goes out of business.”

I’ve poured over numerous quotation databases but have never found the author. Who knows, maybe it was my partner’s quote in the first place?

Thinking about it, it’s not as ludicrous as it sounds. The obvious question would be, “why would a profitable company go out of business?”

Sometimes it’s the insidious combination of a company milking the last bit of profitability out of a product or products, while investing not a dime into infrastructure, personnel, or R&D. Look no further than the LIMS industry of yesteryear. One of the first major LIMS suppliers of the 80’s had a product steeped in archaic technology. Their database was proprietary and they wouldn’t even sell their developer tool to customers until they’d gone through training and paid for some on-site consulting services. The landscape shifted in the early 90’s as the Oracle train rolled into the station, and this vendor was so far behind the technology eight-ball they developed an interface to port data from their own proprietary database to Oracle.  Their fortunes steadily declined, few new sales were tallied, and the product was swallowed up by a competitor to be cannibalized for its existing annual support contracts and customer list.

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Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS Corporation

My earliest memory of RFID-like technology dates back to the 1960’s television show, The Man From U.N.C.L.E, a show inspired by the James Bond movies of the early 60’s, but accessible to a weekly television audience.

Many people think the show was a Bond rip-off, in truth Bond creator Ian Fleming actually helped create the series. In fact, freakish Bond trivia buffs may remember a crime boss in the movie Goldfinger who decides not to invest in the arch criminal’s plan to nuke the Fort Knox gold reserve to a nice, lethal radioactive glow so as to render it valueless. Long story short, the lilly-livered mobster is killed and dumped into the trunk of a car that is then compressed into a cube at a junkyard. His name: Mr. Solo. That name carried over to the Man From U.N.C.L.E.

Robert Vaughn portrayed the suave super-agent Napoleon Solo who pranced around the fictional U.N.C.L.E headquarters in New York City (discretely accessed through Del Floria’s Tailor Shop) with his triangular shaped ID badge with the number 11 prominently displayed. The sensors in the U.N.C.L.E. HQ read the badges and only allowed access to specific areas based on badge information.

Sound familiar?

I can’t say Ian Fleming, or the creators of The Man From U.N.C.L.E are responsible for the concept of RFID badges, but 48 years later, RFID badges are swiped everywhere from the C.I.A. to hotel rooms.   Read the rest of this entry »

Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS Corporation

It’s hard not to notice the impact of the cellular phone on the world these days—not all of it good. I was out to dinner with my family at a Japanese hibachi restaurant and a teenage girl was seated between her mother and her brother, holding her cell phone over the blazing grill and texting away; apparently her family couldn’t hold her interest so she sought more stimulating conversation.  And how many of us have sat patiently at a just-turned-green stoplight waiting for the person in the car in front of us to look up from their phone to notice they’re holding up traffic?

Our growing addiction to data may have been part of a master plan, and a master budget.  What was that Twilight Zone episode from the 60’s? Ah, “To Serve Man”.  In it, the gigantic Richard Kiel (“Jaws” from a couple of Bond flicks) plays an alien who gains the trust of the American public with promises of fantastic technological advances. Of course, it doesn’t end well.  When the title of an alien book is translated as “To Serve Man”, earthlings are comforted that the alien’s intentions are strictly benevolent.  Only after some folks volunteer to travel to the alien home planet to absorb even more astounding technology do they figure out the book is actually an alien cookbook. Oops. Read the rest of this entry »

Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS Corporation

We all love it when something exceeds our expectations; it’s just unfortunate that we are not blown away more often.

I recently worked on a laboratory informatics project where we made liberal use of the Cisco TelePresence system. Yes, this is videoconferencing, and yes, it deserves a rather high-flying name of its own—it’s that good.

In case you haven’t heard much about the system, the top of the line TelePresence systems are more than the sum total of three gigantic plasma TV screens, concert-ready sound system, and real-time collaboration tools. The Feng Shui of a TelePresence room is such that all rooms communicating in a session are constructed to look more or less the same. Why is that important? It means that the semi-circular conference table you are seated at extends into the screen and meets up with identical tables on the other end of the session. Now, pair these aesthetics with high definition video technology, perfect proportioning of the users on the other end of the line, identical lighting and room color, three cameras that focus on everyone in the room, and you have a recipe for mind-melting conference realism. Read the rest of this entry »

Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS Corporation

The marketing machine that is Apple is in full bloom this summer, and expect the buzz to begin to build regarding the iPhone 5, to be released next spring.  How good is Apple at marketing? Look no further than the iPad—a device epitomizing the “solution looking for a problem” slogan.  I’m not saying the iPad is a bad device; it is executed extremely well and Apple has a hard time keeping them on the shelves. It’s fast, has beautiful graphics, and has access to the untold thousands of applications in the Apple App Store.

But while the iPad makes for a great newsreader, and a larger display gaming device, it really doesn’t have an application in mainstream business for the same reason Apple computers rarely become a corporate standard within large companies—they lack true business viability.

For business, you need Windows, and that means you need Microsoft.  OK, I have friends out there who enjoy bashing Microsoft on a daily business, and believe they are truly “sticking it” to the software giant by buying Apple, or playing around with Linux (a good utility server OS, but don’t expect it to infiltrate your desktops and laptops with great success) but here’s the news flash: Apple doesn’t care about mainstream business as they are, and always will be a consumer-based company.

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Randy Hice

Senior Manager, Strategic Consulting

Few things spike the energy level in corporate meetings better than slinging a well-timed buzzword. Gifted practitioners weave gems into everyday speech with such stealth that the recipients barely feel the blow. Greener executives tend to memorize a few of these and wait for a gap in a conversation to insert them, sometimes out of context, and end up sinking to the bottom of the advancement pool.

Ah, do we miss “analysis paralysis” or “mission-critical”? Who among us doesn’t long for the opportunity to resurrect “recontextualize” or “tee it up”?

The term “harmonization” is in vogue these days; read the Wall Street Journal and you’ll come across it nearly every week. The term itself may have the shelf life of the aforementioned catchphrases of the past, but the meaning behind it will last for decades as scientific enterprises try to develop a uniform approach to the business of doing business. Read the rest of this entry »

Randy C. Hice

STARLIMS

So, the recent spate of air traffic controllers waking up to find an exact imprint of their keyboards across their faces after a much needed, but somewhat hazardous dose of shuteye remind us all that mental fatigue’s impact traverses a broad spectrum of pernicious results. Of course, everyone understands that when a controller messes up, hundreds of lives are in peril, so the impact of Rip Van Winkling is immediate, and well-understood.

But what of the weary demo attendee?

How many times do companies following a long, arduous, and not to mention, expensive process to evaluate an informatics solution end up spiking the ball on the ten yard line? For those in the audience not attuned to the cardinal football sin, this is when a player who has the ball is rushing towards the goal line, and in a hilarious display of Attention Deficit Disorder, or maybe spacial unawareness, slams the ball to the turf before reaching the goal line only to be rewarded with a fumble, at best, and a turnover to the opposing team at worst.

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Randy C. Hice

Senior Manager, Strategic Consulting

STARLIMS

I seem to have become a de facto fraud investigator judging by the amount of emails forwarded to me by my friends. These are not your Nigerian 419 schemes (AKA: Advance Fee Schemes, or “I need a home for $1,800,000.00 of my funds. Can you help?), but range from some shocking quote supposedly uttered by a famous person, to the annual fear-mongering threat that your cell phone number is soon to be sold to marketers if you don’t go online to fill out a Do Not Call request (it won’t).

Yes, my “genius” in ferreting out these scams/falsehoods/hoaxes comes from about two minutes of cross-checking Snopes with Hoax.com.

Of course, the people starting hoaxes are usually little more than what I would call “Internet arsonists”. Instead of setting a fire and watching houses or forests blaze from afar, they send out a bogus rumor and implore everyone to forward to at least ten of your friends and watch the logarithmic expansion of their bandwidth-sucking SPAM. 

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