It’s never too early to start planning for next year’s conferences. Apply for and and budget for the 2011 SmartLabs Exchange. Here is the link for more information on the current planning and dates:
http://smartlabexchange.com/Event.aspx?id=369178
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There’s an opportunity to help shape next year’s IQPC Smart Labs Exchange meeting, to be held in Germany (Feb 28 – Mar 2), and become eligible for a £200 discount (subject to the IQPC qualifying process), by responding to this Smart Lab Survey. It will take just a couple of minutes to complete. Feel free to pass this link on to any of your colleagues or peers who work in labs, no matter what industry. Media for Learning I scribble notes on a pad when I conduct interviews for my business. I don’t write many words because I’m trying to understand what people are saying and can’t write and think at the same time. (Half-Polish, can’t chew gum either). My notes are becoming more difficult to reread after a period of time too because my handwriting skills have diminished. Except for my grocery shopping list, I rarely use paper Post Its anymore, preferring electronic versions that are available on most newer PCs and phones. Like most people with Smart phones, I take out mine out frequently so see the reminders often. So this approach works well for me. I do have a paper scribble pad (recycled paper!) that I use every day with a pencil to capture transient bits of information that I use during the day. I throw out the scribbles next day and start a new sheet. This is still more efficient and convenient than a computer based approach. The way that we read information to acquire knowledge has been gradually transforming. Before electronics, brief communication of information (today’s tweets, text messages or emails) was commonly done via oral interaction or sign images like smoke signals, semaphores, etc. The telegraph and telephone replaced these and has broadened the potential audience. Global electronic networks are the phase that we are in now. These kinds of communications usually only convey relatively small bits of information or knowledge. Think about trying to get a university degree by only reading tweets and text messages. That’s not going to get it done. The applicability of collaborative space has been spotty. There are some specific successes, but in general this idea has not expanded significantly over the past 20 years. Remember Lotus Notes? Conveying more complex concepts and ideas, requires a much more structured use of many words than these communication vehicles can easily provide. Most people scan through pages bought up by web search results looking for key words of phrases. They rarely read a page word by word. So what’s the best medium to read a book or long document? I can tolerate reading no more than 3 pages max word for word on my PC screen. Some days, like today, it’s less than one page. It’s the screen angle and overall brightness that gets to me. You can carry around and tilt paper pages, books and eReaders to accommodate your sitting or standing position. Also, most eReaders have the capability of increasing font size which I often do when my eyes get tired at the end of a day. They also are not overly bright, but have good black/white contrast. Most models can’t be read in the dark. I often print a few pages of information to read and then reuse the paper for scribbling. I don’t keep the printed sheets for very long. I print fewer items to read than I did last year and think that this is because I am scanning, skimming speed reading more. Everyone seems to be doing this and I’m not sure whether it is good or bad. Are we learning less and just recycling information more? When paper was king, I read many articles and books word for word then composed my original work. I’m sure I plagiarized some things without giving credit to the proper author, but I (as do many university professors) are seeing many articles, blogs and white papers that are primarily information that has been cut and pasted from other sources and advertised as “original” work. I think that we have to be more selective in the use of our time to acquire new knowledge. Texting, tweeting, information skimming, social networking and other activities can take away too many hours every day and inhibit our capability to compose original ideas. What’s new? Records & Archiving Iron Mountain Incorporated is combining its services for document scanning, file archiving, data backup and more into one solution for hospitals and healthcare organizations converting hardcopy patient files into an electronic medical record (EMR) system. The new Iron Mountain EMR Enablement Solution offers healthcare organizations a complete set of tools for digitizing patient records, archiving electronic files, protecting them from disaster, and then destroying outdated records. Electronic Lab Notebooks / Lab Information Management Systems There have been a number of posts on theintegratedlab.com from time to time about conferences, so it was interesting to be alerted to some comments from Tim Bray and Simon Coles about ‘numbers of attendees’ reported by conference organisers. Now I don’t want to get into that specific issue, but in the background it does relate to the question about the purpose of a conference, and the business model behind it. In my opinion, there are two different sets of requirements that emerge from a progressively maturing marketplace. Most of the meetings held by commercial conference organisers tend to be based on a business model that is aimed at serving vendors’ interests by targeting prospects. The technical programme focuses on case studies and broader, state of the industry/technology-type content. In the laboratory world, we’ve seen these conferences become well established in the LIMS and ELN domains. However, the International LIMS Conferences disappeared some years ago. It may be just a matter of time before a similar fate awaits the ELN conferences. Over time, and as more delegates progress from being prospects to becoming users, the requirements change. In time, a ‘user’ community emerges whose interests are directed not so much towards the purchasing process, but more towards business and technology trends. As a consequence the requirement for the content of a conference has a different focus; you could say the emphasis shifts from the past (this is how we did it, or this is how to do it), to the future (what’s coming next, what will it mean, and how will we cope). This changing interest requires a different model with less emphasis on sales and marketing, and more on emerging or evolving business and technology strategies and trends. To a limited extent, this can be, and is, addressed through the online community. Blogs and discussion groups can deal with this up to a point, despite the restrictions of sharing opinion on-line when you are an employee. But there’s a good number of people who believe that face-to-face meetings are an ideal compliment to on-line communication, and this perhaps explains why there is a sense of frustration that this need is not being met very well at the moment. The challenge for the commercial conference organisers is whether they can evolve a successful business model to address this changing need. In the early part of the life cycle of the big LIMS and ELN conferences, delegates had more questions than answers. When there are more answers than questions, its time to move on. Why are People Afraid of Change? A lot of the early projects I implemented concerned the conversion of paper based business operations to computer based. Through these experiences I learned that the biggest obstacle to implementing new processes was peoples’ inherent fear of change. This is a basic characteristic of people that has been developed through evolution. Men are driven by nature to find the highest place for them within a hierarchy and are motivated to protect their position and move up when possible. Women have different motivations which are concerned with social influence. But they too will fight to maintain their position and status. Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of danger.
If you see that a lot of people are reacting with fear to the changes you are proposing, things have gone very wrong and most likely the program that you are trying to implement is in serious danger of failing. Fear is contagious and will spread rapidly. Here are a few hints on how to minimize the fear reaction. A person trying to introduce change must first of all be likeable and unthreatening. This is much more important initially than extensive explanations about why the change will be a good thing for all. You can be likeable when you sincerely try to learn about people whose job scope will be affected. Be a friend; don’t push your agenda too hard at the beginning. For many people change will mean making some information that they currently control more public. They will cease to be the exclusive “go to” person. This is the “I know something important that no one else knows” power position. Their new role will be to manage the life cycle of the information collection assuring that it is complete and up to date. If they are the information authors the new process should advertise that they are the “inventors” and will fortify their position. There will always be a few people whose fear level will be too high to overcome initially. However, after they see that others are not afraid they will come around. What’s new? RECORDS & ARCHIVING After only a month that Autonomy announced it was buying CA’s information governance business it has already integrated its IDOL search platform into what was CA’s Message Manager ZL Technologies Inc, announced new enterprise-class social media archiving capabilities. Using FaceTime’s Unified Security Gateway, ZL´s Customers can manage a variety of electronic content, from emails to instant messenger, Sharepoint and social media, using the single repository, policy engine and search interface of ZL Unified Archive. Iron Mountain Incorporated has expanded its partnership with InterVision to allow the Santa Clara, Calif. IT firm to offer users of NetApp and Microsoft Exchange Iron Mountain’s newly-acquired NearPoint(TM) solution for archiving, accessing and protecting email. InterVision’s customers can now enjoy high performance, manageability and lower operating costs by combining leading technology from NetApp and Iron Mountain in a single integrated solution for managing Microsoft Exchange. ELN / LIMS |
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