Renaissance man
–noun
1.    A cultured man of the Renaissance who
was knowledgeable, educated, or proficient
in a wide range of fields.

2.    (Sometimes lowercase ) a present-day man who
has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency
in more than one field.

My old friend Peter touched base with me a few days ago, and he is one of what I call The Last of the True Characters. Peter is about 80 now, but hasn’t lost a step. A Harvard man, Peter came to be my orthodontist when I lived in Atlanta. Anyone who has gone through orthodontics treatment knows that you spend quite a bit of time with your doctor. Peter and I were kindred spirits, and immediately became friends. I think I liked Peter right after he put my braces on and I told him there was a bit of pain.

“That’s no problem. Here’s what you do; go home, grab two fingers of a fifteen-year-old scotch, and swirl it around your teeth.”

Each trip to his practice started with going back to his back office and shooting the breeze for 20-30 minutes. Each time, our conversation revealed yet another layer of this remarkable man.

Among the gems:

• He had been the head dentist for a state prison system. I asked him, “didn’t you ever worry those guys would attack you?”
• “Nah, they knew I could hurt them really, really bad.”
• He’d started a recording studio in Atlanta to produce dance music, and was doing quite well at it. He was spending quite a bit of time supervising the studio operations.
• He’d been up on the east coast working with a plastics shop to make some eyeglass straps that he intended to patent and sell.
• He held up a movie in his hand. He asked if I’d ever seen it. Peter mentioned he’d made some money off the picture because he’d purchased the screenplay for it prior to the movie being made and had marketed it to Hollywood.
• He had gotten into mountain climbing, and had to be carried off a 23,000 ft peak after experiencing a cerebral edema. Although his neurosurgeon recommended that he never climb again, Peter was already planning his next climbing trip.

Peter was great at giving advice, but not so good at taking advice. I had a complex business question, so Peter referred me to his business attorney. During our first meeting, the attorney mentioned that he wondered why Peter referred me to him.

“I’ve been giving him advice for thirty years and he’s never taken any of it.”

Peter told me that because I’d gotten braces as an adult, I’d be wearing a retainer for many years, perhaps forever.  I then noticed he was wearing braces himself and asked him about them. “Oh, I refuse to wear a retainer, so I just put on a new set of braces every couple of years.”

Peter retired to Florida and I kept in contact with him via email. I’d lost track of him after I moved to Colorado in 2002, and he surfaced by sending me an email.

“Dear Randy, I’m off to Australia to do some big game fishing. I’m trying to improve my technique for local billfish tournaments. By the way, I took a side trip to New Zealand to do some bungee jumping.”

Keep in mind, Peter was about 72 at the time.

So we return to the Renaissance Man, a term alluding in part to versatility.

Today’s object lesson regards software versatility. More and more, we are seeing that versatility is a quality the scientific enterprise is seeking in a LIMS. No longer content to purchase a one-trick-pony system to meet the current needs of one laboratory entity within the company; these customers are looking for systems with rich enough functionality to be extensible to more than one group.

The sophistication of today’s customers is a function of several contributing factors. First, there is a great deal of information available on the Internet in terms of supplier web sites and customer networking sites. Second, a general awareness of the pace of software evolution has led to a simultaneous expectation that systems should be able to do a lot more than the tasks at hand. There once was a time when customers would only focus a LIMS on one narrow set of requirements, and within one division of that company. If a LIMS was purchased for quality control in a manufacturing environment, there was rarely cross-pollination to the R&D division. The lack of “big picture” thinking was not always an artifact of functional unawareness; often organizational barriers were in place to scuttle any true collaboration (cynically: where are the financial incentives to share information?)

Today, a combination of economic pressures and a more top-down view of informatics architectures have created the ability for disparate organizations to bridge more than one division. As an example, a system purchased for Quality may well have an application in clinical research.

In such cases, where two distinctive data dictionaries are required because the two organizations (Quality and R&D) operate so very differently, two installations of STARLIMS could be loaded on the same server, or each on its own server. While the IT department would have only one application to support and maintain, the Separation of Church and State issue would thus be resolved by keeping the two instances at a logical distance.

But in cases where several different groups utilize STARLIMS in very different ways; for example, a dissolution lab and a microbiology lab, roles would be set up in STARLIMS to completely tailor the screens routinely used by each group to reflect the workflow of that laboratory. In other words, with the proper application of group roles, dissolution screens would never be viewed by the micro group, and vice versa. Practically speaking, there might be a third role in this scenario called “QA Reviewer” whereby the data generated by dissolution and micro would both be fair game for the final review and data release process.

Taking the versatility theme one step farther, in the past, companies purchased separate applications to address Scientific Document Management, Electronic Laboratory Notebooks, Instrument Calibration and Maintenance, Analyst Qualification, Environmental Monitoring, and Stability. STARLIMS addresses all of these needs.

As customers demand more from their enterprise informatics solution, STARLIMS is meeting the demand with a bit of our own Renaissance.