This week, I ran a workshop at a VIBEvents conference on Laboratory Data Management in Munich on the subject of The Integrated Laboratory of the Future. Within the class, whilst we were talking about the current constraints on achieving a fully integrated environment, there was a specific point raised about our limited outlook as scientists, and to what extent this may be a constraint. Now I don’t think that scientists as such are any more limited in their outlook than any other profession or domain, it’s just that the intense focus on a specific area or discipline often means that other interesting things may pass us by, either because we didn’t have time to find out, or we just weren’t looking. There may be two reasons for this: one is our individual approach to change, and the other is how do we find interesting, relevant information that isn’t in our usual domain? With regard to change, I have previously posted some thoughts on this ‘Are your users revolting?’, but I came across a post ‘Communicating Science’ on the Spreading Science website which touched on exactly the same issue but from the perspective of communication rather than technology adoption. It reinforces the underlying anthropological principles of dealing with change, and gives some very powerful clues about who the key players are when it comes to instigating and driving change.
Finding interesting, relevant information that isn’t in our usual domain is a different challenge. This can be a very individual approach based to some extent upon the way we think about problems, about who we know, who we network with and, increasingly, how we use internet tools to find, filter and deliver information to us. From a personal perspective, I find that building a personalised page in iGoogle that incorporates news searches, blog searches and RSS feeds is saving me a considerable amount of time per day, and every so often, something turns up that I’m convinced that I would have otherwise missed. But trying to find something when we don’t know what we are looking for is still a challenge. Is this where semantics and the new investments in search engines (Bing, Wolfram Alpha) come in?
I was having a conversation with a past customer just a few days ago and he asked me how companies that are changing the way they interact and that use some of the new tools are successfully doing it. He was referring to getting the labs to use wikis and other internal tools.
He gave this example: In his new company, one of the upper managers put out a great tool that’s, new, hot and exciting and that “everyone will love.” It’s a tool that could be really helpful to share data and ideas. Hardly anyone is using it. Upon further questioning, it turns out this upper manager hasn’t done anything besides highly advertising it to the labs, but it is a tool the company wants the labs to regularly use, for a variety of strategic reasons.
I pointed this user back to his own success at his previous company where he got everyone to put their project documents into Documentum. Some of the people on the project hadn’t used it, before, and were, technically speaking, not actually required to use it (different groups used different repositories). We all universally hated it. BUT — he announced it would be our project’s central repository. He made sure we had accounts and were trained on it. At the weekly project meetings, he reminded us. Early on, whenever we’d mention a project document, he’d remember to ask if it was in Documentum. Eventually, the rest of us remembered to put pressure on anyone that forgot. So, he got us into the habit and reinforced it. He succeeded because he had a plan. He didn’t merely tell us to use it and think it would happen on its own.
This is oversimplifying the process of affecting change. However, I wanted to make the point that, even when we’re talking about something that’s fairly straightforward, getting people to change their behavior takes a plan and takes work. Nothing “just happens” and there are few tools or ideas that are so great that we just go with them with lots of assistance, especially on a larger scale.