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.

Who would have guessed that the only tree in the parking lot served as a restroom to every bird within a few miles, and the featured plat du jour was the dark blue berries of some local tree? When I emerged from work that night, my white rental car was now a collage of piled up bird, ah, “leavings” spanning all of the imaginable shades of purple. When I rolled my car into the hotel, the parking valets struggled mightily to keep from laughing until I burst out myself. They took such pity on me they took the car to the car wash and brought it back sparkling.

The other memorable incident from my time on site was that I had conducted an extensive workflow analysis throughout the site that diagrammed all of the laboratory operations on the campus. I was interviewing a laboratory manager, “Dr. Jones” and he mentioned that he was researching the particular properties of a specific polymer.

I said, “Oh, you must be working with ‘Dr. Smith’ on the third floor then?”

He replied, “No, why do you think so?”

“Because he’s working on the same thing.”

“He is? How long has he been working on it?”

“I think he said two or three years.”

Later that day, I was in a meeting with a high-level manager; what we used to call a “Type A personality.” I mentioned the conversation I had that morning.

“What? Are you sure?”  He was one of these redheaded guys whose face flushed crimson with anger—as it was now.

“I am.”

He lurched to his feet, and walked out of the meeting without another word. We all looked at each other until he returned ten minutes later.

He sat down and said, “Problem solved. What’s next?”

It turns out the company ranked every single employee in the building. The bonuses you received were based on that ranking.  There was no incentive to collaborate with other scientists because their success could push you down the seriatim ranking within the company, and hence reduce one’s bonus. Of course, not collaborating was considered taboo, and managers would quickly extinguish unproductive behavior (as did the aforementioned manager), but still—the metric was the problem.

These days we have tools for collaboration and they are getting better. Cloud storage of documents allows universal access for editing, comment, and refinement. What about contact management? Look how tools like Microsoft Outlook now allow integration of social network into your Outlook profile.

We have chat tools for times when an email is overkill, too slow, or the topic too sensitive. And if you don’t have the time to wait for slow responses from a chat session, there is always texting: dump the message, pocket your smartphone, and check later. No annoying chitchat, no carefully calibrated responses to appease the sixteen people cc’d on the message, just a hit and run assault.

The meeting software from WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Windows Meeting Space, among others, have changed the way conferences can be conducted, and my earlier blog extolling the virtues of the remarkable Cisco TelePresence videoconferencing facility that takes us all one step closer to Star Trek holographic meeting attendees sitting before us.

And why not gravitate to videoconferencing? The airlines are doing little to quench our thirst for alternatives to air travel. The continuing nightmarish merger of airlines usually results in (a) fewer routes and (b) fierce competition for upgraded seats. I’d be shocked if the airlines didn’t realize that road warriors who fly more than 50,000 miles a year could care less about “free tickets”, yet every time I log into the United kiosk to get my boarding passes I am forced to read an offer of accelerated miles for X dollars.

Really? Road warriors don’t care for the “mega miles” scheme because we know that using frequent flyer miles is a joke. Open seats for base level redemption, say around 25,000 miles, are booked 8-12 months out. When you travel 50,000 miles a year, you can’t predict whether business travel might be required almost a year down the road, so we easily resist the “offer” to buy more miles. The miles that are important to the business travel are the so-called “base miles”. These are actual miles that count towards elite flyer status, and thus upgrades, early boarding, and the like.  These are not the kind of miles you are pestered to buy at airport kiosks—those miles do not count as base miles. So why buy them?

Business travelers covet business or first class seats for reasons you might not believe. First, the room to work without someone slamming a seat on your laptop without warning. Second, you are on and off the plane with plenty of room for carry-on bags. Free drinks? Food? Please. Few business travelers pound alcoholic drinks en route to a morning or afternoon meeting. The food? Many refuse meals because they’re working. Last, there is something the airline industry calls “pitch”. That is the distance from your seat to the one in front of you, well, technically, from a point on your seat to the identical point on the one in front of you. For example, take the distance from the tip of your armrest to the tip of the armrest in front of you—that’s the pitch. So, JetBlue Airlines features a cavernous pitch of 34 inches[1] in coach, while my home carrier here in Denver, United, has a pitch of 31 inches. You think 3 inches is no big deal? Think again. Three measly inches is the difference between opening a standard-size laptop all the way to opening it at less than a 90 degree angle and being forced to type in a weird, tenuous, “tip-up” sort of configuration. I wonder how much productivity is killed because cattle-car passengers can’t open their laptops?

But the merger of airlines has created class warfare. 50,000 miles/year frequent flyers used to catch free upgrades perhaps 70% of the time. Now, when the top echelons of two airlines are crammed into one program, 50K travelers are peons to the 100,000 mile per year travelers. It’s like the joke we have about Aspen, Colorado—the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires. A paltry 50,000 mile/year traveler will now get upgraded less than 10% of the time. The result? If the prices are the same between your preferred airline where you now have no chance for an upgrade, and another airline that gets you to your destination hours earlier—well, it’s a no-brainer.

It’s funny, no, ironic, that measures meant to increase productivity or revenues often have the opposite effect. It’s like the U.S. Postal Service dilemma. Mail volume has been whacked by email, costs go up, so the Postal Service ups the cost of postage, and fewer people send letters. Wash, rinse, repeat.

So, the more airlines tighten the screws on their highest revenue customers, the more anxious those customers are to avoid travel. The more those big spenders avoid travel, the less the revenues for the airlines. Do you see the pattern?
[1] www.airlinequality.com

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.

The curious case of Ryan Braun, the superstar outfielder and National League MVP of the Milwaukee Brewers focuses a laser on the criticality of sample COC. Facing a 50-game suspension for testing positive for impossibly unnatural levels of testosterone, Braun dodged the figurative bullet, and the $5 million he would have forfeited immediately, not to mention at least some endangerment of his $145 million in salary through 2020.  Braun hasn’t directly attacked the positive test result; rather, he challenged the sample COC. An arbitrator agreed, and he is clear to play next year. So why not simply say “it’s not my sample”? At some juncture, he supposedly offered to submit to DNA testing, but later reportedly withdrew the offer.  An admission of possible guilt or just the sound advice of a good legal team? You decide. By challenging the COC of the sample, it can be inferred that somewhere in the handling process malfeasance occurred, and someone may have pipetted a little extra testosterone into Braun’s vial. So the focus is now deflected from Braun to the sample handler who reportedly took the sample home and stored it in his refrigerator, hence a glaring flaw in the COC. Of course, deliberately messing with a sample of a person with the financial resources to “lawyer up” with the best attorneys on the planet—well, seems like a risky strategy to me, but I digress.

Lance Armstrong challenged the COC of samples sent to French lab in 1999 that were kept in storage there with “anonymous” identifiers. French scientists, subsequent to the initial storage of the samples, developed a new method for detecting erythropoietin (EPO), a performance enhancing drug allegedly popular among professional cyclists who covet its blood oxygen-boosting properties. The French Sports publication L’ Equipe found documents linking the formerly anonymous identifiers to specific riders, and with the generally accepted notion that the French didn’t believe Armstrong’s 7 Tour de France titles were accomplished without some pharmacological help, beat the hornet’s nest with a stick.  Once again; lack of adecent COC caused that specific set of accusations to be kicked to the curb.

Of course, the 1995 so-called Trial of the Century whereby O.J. Simpson faced charges for the murder of his ex-wife and her friend served to educate the public on the difference between “not guilty” and “innocent”; it also highlighted the COC issue when O.J.’s blood samples were not tracked with the diligence necessary to avoid a conviction “beyond reasonable doubt”. O.J. walked, and no other suspects have ever surfaced.

COC issues are not limited to the rich and famous. Whereas we have discussed three high-profile cases, there are untold thousands of cases where botched COC has caused healthy people to be diagnosed with life-threatening conditions, people with life-threatening conditions being diagnosed as healthy, and thousands of criminals cast out to the streetsbecause someone mislabeled, misplaced, or otherwise misplayed what should be a straightforward process.

The bottom line is that the most ancient of LIMS functions are still the most important. Of course, while STARLIMS provides comprehensive sample tracking and COC, we are still left with human error, and samples misidentified at the collection point, improperly stored, or otherwise left unattended are likely never to go away.

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.

This scenario has been repeated in this decade. A product that once sat atop the industry in the 90’s slowly saw its R&D budgeted savaged as the last few drops of profitability were emptied from the canteen. There would be bull sessions at the annual user group meeting where customer requests for new features or problem fixes were passionately voiced and documented, only to be ignored until the following year’s meeting where the same issues resurfaced like Sonny & Cher’s “I got you babe” in the movie Groundhog Day.  An exodus of key personnel followed, and eventually a competitor bought the moribund product, abandoned it, and began to craft a message to convince those customers lodged in LIMS purgatory that the migration from the dead product to the company’s flagship application was no more than a minor update process.

Of course it isn’t true. Moving from a product with one database schema to another with an entirely foreign structure will cause enough pain and suffering that there will be no shortage of missed expectations.  Most customers know this and will simply initiate an evaluation and selection workflow that will consider all current products on an equal footing. Today’s customers are sophisticated enough to know that nothing comes easy, especially moving from one product to another; even when both products are owned by the same company.

I sometimes play “prospective customer” at the early stage of the LIMS evaluation continuum and peruse the web sites of prospective suppliers.  In one case, I came across a company with so many products, yet no cogent discussion as to where they might be positioned; I was left shaking my head in bewilderment.  Abandoning that site, I moved to another where I quickly learned that investments in the web site were, shall we say, not a priority. Product announcements listed as new and innovative were dated back to early 2008. I was left wondering how prospective customers might perceive this as a lackadaisical and complacent attitude.

Maybe we come full circle to “a company is most profitable…”

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.  

Radio Frequency IDentification devices are available in two general categories, Active and Passive.

Active devices are battery powered and have very long range. Here in Denver, cars screaming along the E-470 tollway sport active RFID devices attached with Velcro to the windshield. Even at the breathtaking speeds some Coloradans pass through receiving antennae readers, the tag is read and your toll account is duly decremented.  These active RFID devices aren’t cheap and do not lend themselves to the same application as passive RFID devices. Passive RFID chips must be activated by an antenna and then dump their pertinent information to computers. My golden retriever, Chester, carries an RFID chip for life in the event he decides to chase a coyote into the next county. Don’t laugh; the Internet is full of stories of cats and dogs wandering hundreds, or even thousands of miles only to find their way to a shelter or vet who scans their tag and locates their owner. Local canine phenomenon, Buster Brown, was found in California this past summer. Harder to explain was how Buster Brown managed to traverse the Utah and Nevada deserts en route to California. Perhaps he belonged to Bear Grylls?

So why then are barcodes still the overwhelming technological choice over RFID in laboratories and manufacturing operations around the world?  There are two answers to the question; cost and technological limitations.

From a cost perspective, it makes sense to attach an active RFID device onto those PlayStation 3 and Xbox gaming devices in retail stores. These valuable assets tend to experience “inventory shrinkage” and active RFID tags are the ones that trigger the air raid sirens when someone “inadvertently” walks out without paying.  Although stores can remove and re-use those active RFID tags, in the informatics industry the devices are impractical for sample tracking; therefore we are left with passive RFID labels, often required in quantities of thousands or hundreds of thousands. It sounds good: sample chain of custody can be tracked as samples are walked from one location to the next without human intervention. From a computer monitor, samples can be instantly located to the last RFID tracking scanner they passed—the more scanners, the more accurate the location information.

While these scanners and their accompanying software aren’t cheap, the real money required is in the labels. With costs often approaching a $1.00 per RFID label for extensive information, or $.05-$.40 for a simple serial number, RFID labels cannot normally compete with 2D or conventional barcodes. The encoding process is not trivial either. RFID tags must be encoded with sample information prior to use and are usually much larger than 2D barcode tags, thus limiting their viability.

Costs and size aside, we must also consider the paradox of the demand to accurately track massive quantities of samples quickly against the tag differentiation challenges of passive RFID scanners. One of the rate limiting steps in the workflow of scanning barcodes is often human handling of samples.  Obviously the labor required to manually scan barcodes can be quite significant for thousands of samples, and a cheap RFID tag attached to sample moving past an antenna would be quite a boon to productivity, but on the other hand, so many tags close together cause non-sequential reads, or possibly interfere with one another. Separating thousands of samples by a foot or two is also not practical.

Still, RFID is here to stay, and it is assured that technology will evolve and the costs will decline. It is safe to assume that one day RFID will push most barcodes into oblivion.

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.

To say most people depend on their phones cheapens the term “depend”. I’m as guilty as anyone; as an example, when I program my DirecTV DVR at home, it is far faster to search for programs and record them to specific receivers in my house with an iPhone app than it is to go to the receivers and search and record individually.

We are enticed to gluttonous data consumption. Online gaming? Munch, munch. Check the news?  Weather, sports scores, Google? Serve it up. Many people don’t even buy watches any longer because cell phone time is right there.

Of course there’s a catch. Once we became thoroughly addicted to the little devils, the demand for data mushroomed and unlimited data plans went the way of the hot meal in economy class on planes. Most carriers established ceilings for data consumption and above that limit, either charged the consumer dearly, or slowed down their speed of access in anachronistic blip in the march of technological progress.

For their employees, many large corporations standardized on particular carriers on the very basis of unlimited data. Placed between a rock and a hard place, and under pressure to placate those big corporate customers, some carriers maintained the unlimited data plans in the form of grandfather clauses, keeping  the data gobblers happily sucking down the gigabytes. That was until the consumers who toted both a laptop and a cell phone discovered “tethering”—the utilization of a cell phone as a cellular modem. With some hotels and resorts banging their customers for fifteen bucks a day for high speed Internet, there was a compelling reason to dodge those charges by simply linking the computer to the Internet via the cellular network.

Enough was enough, and some carriers simply disabled the function for customers on unlimited data plans. If, however, you renounced your rights to the unlimited plan, tethering is restored and all is right with the world—for a price. But by renouncing an unlimited data plan for the privilege of running an end-around the hotel wireless policies, all other data usage must be monitored and the ramifications of doing so are enormous.

But smart phones and cellular-enabled tablet computers show great potential in the informatics market—irrespective of price. Not too many years ago, the advent of wireless LANS allowed laboratories to free up bench top space by allowing users to move laptops from one work area to another. After all, a centrally served, browser-accessed application such as STARLIMS can be accessed via a wireless LAN.

But there are some limitations with wireless LANS with the cost of widespread installation among them, and for utilization away from the home office. Enter LTE, the screamingly fast 4G network offered by some carriers, with others to follow within the year. What does LTE bring to the picture?

I have DSL for my Internet service. No matter what speed my carrier says is possible, the reality is my upload speed is about 3.3 Mbps. Not bad you say? A recent independent agency tested the new AT&T cellular LTE speeds in the Houston area and hit nearly 65 Mbps. Yikes!  Now, probably a better gauge is the Verizon LTE network which hits 25 Mbps all the time. What will happen when AT&T rolls out their new LTE service to the general world? Well, expect the speeds to come down, but still, if they drop to, say, 30 Mbps, that is honking fast.

But do we care if our email is faster? Our text messages? Nah, they’re plenty fast. But streaming video, music downloads, and bigger chunks of data, well that is a big deal.

Now, as LTE networks avail themselves to smart phones and tablet PCs, the gimmick factor disappears and the “wow” factor increases. Let’s be honest: people buy smart phones and tablet PCs for reasons other than work, but if having one makes work easier, then why not use the same device?

Thinking about mobile informatics and these blazing speeds, the first two benefits that come to mind are field-level mobility, and the ability to download graphics, pictures, and other huge files with speed.

 When you think about field-level mobility, forensics and environmental monitoring applications seem like a good fit. In the former, the ability to take and upload crime scene photos from anywhere in real time would be a huge benefit. In the environmental monitoring realm, entering data/readings for environmental sampling points while roaming around in, often remote, territories would certainly bring a high level of efficiency to the picture.

And there will be more. Build it and they will come, they said in Field of Dreams. In the world of high-speed data transfers and astonishing handheld devices, flesh out the data super speedway and innovation will find its way to market.

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.

How good is the system? Well, because of those three cameras, the person you are talking to looks into your eyes (and you into theirs) and their sizing is exactly the same as it would be if they were in the room with you. The high definition video is so crisp—well, why not give an example. At the other end of the line, I was speaking with a person in Ireland. I was on the west coast and wondered what time it actually was over there. Ah, all I had to do was wait until this gentleman rested his arm on the table and I could clearly make out the hands on his watch.

Let’s take on the “joys of travel”. Here we are in an age when everyone is talking about job creation. So why is it that I go to the airport and see that two-thirds of all available TSA security lanes are closed even with lines snaking into the next zip code? How about ever-increasing baggage fees, the vicious competition for upgrades (a coach seat means working on the plane is nearly impossible unless you don’t mind your laptop being snapped in two when the person in front of you leans back), and the sheer joy of knowing airlines are reducing flights to pack planes to the rafters.

The entire premise for videoconferencing was that face-to-face communications were a huge improvement over voice-only calls—in theory they are, but not when people move around as blurry, jerky, blobs speaking with haunting echo-chamber voices. Such sessions typically left the attendees muttering about poor quality and the futility of such attempts. Solemn vows were spoken never to try it again.

But Cisco, and any other videoconferencing companies following their lead, will certainly change the way we conduct meetings and projects in the future path of in-your-face realism.

And not a moment too soon.

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.

That’s not to say that Apple isn’t a remarkable organization—they are; the iPod and iPhone are best-of-class solutions, and the simplicity of setting up Apple desktops and laptops is legendary, as is the remarkable stability and versatility of their operating systems. However, Apple doesn’t always hit home runs. Their first attempt at a non-corporate email and calendar system, MobileMe, was profoundly abysmal in design and execution. And for my money, I’m consistently disappointed by iTunes. The usability of this product is uncharacteristically poor and the user interface is shockingly obtuse. And in a shameless attempt to churn business, the incorporation of “Genius” functionality to “suggest” songs and artists related to the ones you’ve just purchased is an eyesore and obtrusive.

So is Apple a choice for Business?  Not a chance.  Give me a small notebook running Windows 7 and I have a useful business device rather than a head-turning toy.

To their credit, Apple does pave the way for imitation, and the technological bandwagon is full of “me too” innovators. Look back to the very inception of Windows after the Apple Macintosh appeared. Those neat little folder icons created a corporate war between Apple and Microsoft over something as simple as a file icon leading you to other file icons. Flash forward to the iPhone.  My son has a competing Android cell phone, and I played around with it recently and was supremely impressed.  The lesson learned is that just because the geniuses (and I’m not being sarcastic, they are very bright an innovative people) at Apple pave the way, doesn’t mean they will always have the superior solution.

That brings us full circle back to the iPad.  Microsoft recently announced that they intend to support one operating system across all devices. Why is that important? It means that the system on your desktop, laptop, and tablet PC will all run an OS optimized for all devices, including those with touch screens.  Although the crosshairs of this strategy are not aimed at Apple, the implications are obvious.

My old Apple-loving chum finally bristled when I said the iPad didn’t do a thing for me because I couldn’t run MS Office in its full glory. He quickly countered, “I have an Apple desktop and I run Office just fine.”  There was a glaring error in his statement: the Apple desktop and laptop OS is not the same as that running on the iPad or iPhone. Try editing an MS Word document on the latter two devices, playing around with a complex Excel spreadsheet—not gonna happen.

So, as Microsoft provides a touch screen OS to the tablet PC suppliers, we now have devices that can do almost everything an iPad does, but also have portability into the business office.  What is so cool about this in the field of laboratory automation? One word: footprint.

In visiting hundreds of scientific enterprises during my career, I have two axioms:

• There are never enough conference rooms
• There is never enough laboratory workbench space

The Windows tablets will not solve the former—a company building new conference rooms finds that, like extra lanes built onto highways, the extra capacity is quickly overwhelmed. But the latter means that we now can take a thin, light, and comparatively impervious device (tablets are much more spill-resistant than laptops) into the laboratory and collect sampling point data, trigger instrument interfaces, generate reports, log samples, and an endless list of LIMS-related tasks. While developing sophisticated documents is not the power alley of tablet PCs, routine tasks are certainly in play, and having one OS across all devices will cause most IT organizations to sleep easier at night.

My hat is off to Apple for their innovation—may it never cease, but the separation of Church and State exemplified by Apple’s indifference to mainstream business creates opportunities that we as business people can use and appreciate.

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.

In times past, the entire top tier of all LIMS were client-server applications; their very design encouraged the development of fiefdoms within a company because any attempt at harmonization would be a matter of consensus, not architecture.  Not only did the deployments of LIMS vary significantly from site to site, the local managers were fierce iconoclasts who defiantly bucked any attempt at standardization. But, as they say, when corporations say one thing but reward another, people will always follow their measurements. Plant managers were the equivalent of the feudal lords described so well by the late James Clavell in his epic Shogun. To emulate the operations of another plant, even one producing exactly the same products, was a sign of weakness and a pronounced lack of creativity.

And even the less-contentious plant managers found it difficult to emulate the exact LIMS design used in another plant because certain localized nuances indigenous to each site caused divergence from a central model, no matter how well-intentioned.

Fast forward to the present day. True web-based applications such as STARLIMS by definition indicate that a centralized application can be shared by users accessing the system via a web browser. Such an approach trumpets the obvious benefits of ease of support, reduced training, and a diminished hardware and compliance costs. Yet with the ability to simplify comes the necessity to consolidate and homogenize; the very root of harmonization in the scientific enterprise. In many cases, the advent of a web-based LIMS often catalyzes the need to harmonize, and compels an organization to examine their processes in detail, often for the first time. Now, the increased understanding of harmonization is causing a shift in the metrics of those feudal lords (I mean plant managers) towards a cost-efficient operation serving the greater good of the corporation, and not the local site.

One aspect of harmonization that is not clearly understood is that any introspection of business processes carries with it the need to look at process improvements that may or may not have anything to do with software.

Here’s one of my favorite examples.  Years ago, my team was examining the sample receiving function of a laboratory operation. Our workflow analysis quickly identified the fact that samples were often dropped off without any paperwork or acknowledgement of receipt from the lab. We pointed this out to senior management who promptly pushed back on us when we suggested they needed much better chain of custody. Their reasoning:  “we’ve never had a need for it.”

Some important back-story:  this company was (and is) one of the top poultry processors in the world, and they test samples of chicken every weekday. On a Friday a week or two after the managerial discussion, numerous samples of raw chicken were delivered directly to the desk of the technician who routinely performed a specific series of tests. Again, no record of the sample delivery was logged. The problem was the technician had left work early for some reason, and the chicken samples sat on his desk all weekend.

We arrived back in the lab Monday morning, and the moment we opened the door to the building, the fowl was foul.  A tsunami of stench assaulted us as we tried to pinpoint the source of the stink, finally arriving at the analyst’s bench. To make matters worse, some of the lab techs grabbed two or three cans of lilac scented air freshener and emptied them in one continuous volley. This compounded the problem by layering a revolting floral aroma over the entirely vile Eau de Roadkill with the net effect of producing an even more noxious atmosphere in the lab. We exited the building with all due alacrity, and vowed not to return until the air quality index improved significantly.

While harmonization is a key factor in the planning of today’s modern informatics architecture, we must pay attention to the constituent elements of the activity.  We have the operational process consolidation tasks including congruence of test and sample nomenclature,  calculation/rounding consistency, data review and approval protocol, and we also must examine that there are operational efficiencies we can address that might not lie within the scope of the LIMS.

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.

It happens to companies who have performed their due diligence in evaluating informatics solutions, but at the 11^th hour, schedule four or five demos in rapid succession, and end up rendering the brains of their attendees into gelatinous goo. Tired attendees make mistakes, or rush to judgment “just to be done with it”, as a customer once told me.

I swear to you the following story is true.

I worked with a company who did all the right things; they hired experienced consultants, developed meticulous workflows and requirements documents, and created a great vendor evaluation form. Four prominent vendors were brought in to demo over two days. After each demo, the customer team was debriefed as to what their impressions of the demo were. By the end of the second day, bleary-eyed victims of the demo marathon walked into the debriefing room with all of the enthusiasm of a high school delinquent showing up for detention. No meaningful comments could be dragged from the attendees, until one senior lab manager said,

“I thought the sales guy dressed sloppily.”

That was it, and despite persistent solicitation of more substantive feedback, that vendor was eliminated on the basis of sartorial malpractice.

It is a mistake for customers to focus on raw functionality as the sole basis for system selection.  What matters more than flashy screens, colorful icons, automated workflow graphics, and a compelling pricing structure is the value a supplier can provide to a company.

Value comes in many forms. It might be the comfort level a customer has that the vendor is forming a long-term teaming relationship. It might mean that the vendor is pouring serious funding into R&D to keep their products far ahead of the tsunami of technological platform and tools advancements. It might also be something as simple as clear, concise, and consistent customer communications.

Notice I didn’t mention functional fireworks. Truth be told, projects rarely fail due to a lack of product functionality; they fail due to elements not captured on a customer’s evaluation spreadsheet.

Considering these less tangible aspects of informatics evaluation, when the hullaballoo of the demos has died down, it is time to consider that the long-term relationship and comfort elements are what allow customers to sleep well at night—hopefully, it is in fact night.

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. 

And don’t get me started on Facebook either. All those people clicking on “like” this or that, and if I get another notice that some event has occurred in Farmville, I swear I’ll go postal.

I guess the barrage of HAM (my new term for Hoaxes and SPAM that I’m hoping will catch on if you send this article to ten of your friends) has heightened my sensitivity to mixed marketing messages in the LIMS industry.

Let’s step back a moment. There were web-based LIMS offering a decade ago, but with HTML as the basis for forms development, entering a value on a form was an all-or-nothing proposition. You change one field, ka-boom, you had to send the entire form to the server.  So the user interfaces were at best, clunky, and at worst, laughably inept.

XML changed that specific problem, and SOAP-based web services also gave the developers many more arrows in their development quiver. Some of the more progressive suppliers offering web-based LIMS jumped on those bandwagons, and user interfaces, and the applications themselves, improved.

Just one problem: why did some suppliers not move management functions, system configuration tools, and all their modules into their web model? I’m sorry, but if you don’t have all of these features available from a web browser, then it is a hybridized system, complete with the problems attendant to hosting such a mixed bag.

STARLIMS has been 100% web-based in the purest sense of the term, since the inception of V 10 in 2006. That means that every system deployed since 2006 is web-based.  By contrast, some folks out there in the industry who claim to have a web-based LIMS have a very, very small percentage of their deployed systems that can be called web-based. What that means for a lot of companies who demand a web-based LIMS is that they are being asked to be on the so-called “bleeding edge” of technology for a supplier’s untested system, or being “sold” on why a terminal services or CITRIX version might be a better fit instead.

This is not necessarily an indication of malfeasance on the part of most suppliers, rather, it’s often a matter of new system design that has not gained a technological foothold in the industry, or perhaps some potential customers are uncomfortable with the prospect of being a test site for “beta” software.

Either way, the STARLIMS approach is to utilize the industry-leading Microsoft platform for development while committing 100% to the web-based LIMS demanded by the consumer base.