I attended the IQPC SmartLab Exchange conference in London a couple of weeks ago. This was the 4th year that IQPC have run this event, and it is distinguished from other conferences in the general ‘laboratory systems’ world, by the interactive nature of the agenda, and also by the fact that the attendance is by invitation only. However, the invitation comes with the usual hefty price tag!
This year’s event was probably the most successful of the series, both in terms of the numbers attending (recession, what recession?) and in terms of content. I have no explanation for the attendance level, but the content had a bias towards the future, rather than concentrating on the past or present. Too many conferences in this domain rely heavily on case studies, or assessment of various factors influencing the current market status.
SmartLab Exchange had a number of presentations and workshops that were geared more towards emerging technologies and their potential in the world of the laboratory. Web 2.0 was inevitably the focus, and it was interesting to observe that social tools should be getting some attention in the normally reserved and constrained domain of the laboratory! Web 2.0, or ‘social’ networking seems to be the saviour of Knowledge Management, so there seems to be some logic in looking at its potential in science, where adding to the world’s knowledge repository is a fundamental objective.
However, the typical reaction from the laboratory world is one of doubt, aligned to concerns such as IP protection, regulatory compliance and cultural aspects. Of these, I suspect that the technology issues can be resolved; the culture may be more challenging. Also, I suspect that in the short term that these tools will not challenge the formal systems we use in the laboratory for acquiring, processing and managing data and information.
A more likely scenario is that they will act as a substitute for the less formal communication that is currently conducted by email. Email represents a fairly disorganised and inefficient way of handling collaboration. Few would argue against the fact that email is a major personal productivity tool, but compared to social tools such as blogs or wikis, it’s capability to manage an evolving, multi-participant discussion aligned to a specific project or activity is less satisfactory.
Put more simply, the purpose of email is to send and receive correspondence, and to provide facilities to file it and to manage it in private folders – basically an electronic version of the traditional filing cabinet; good for personal correspondence, but not for collaboration, and totally dependent on the individual’s ability to organise it according to personal preference. Email is already proving to be a nightmare in terms of records management and e-discovery.
Electronic Lab Notebooks have shown the significant benefits of collaboration by replacing paper notebooks; can blogs and wikis follow suit by replacing email as a collaboration tool in the laboratory?
