When it comes to purchasing and implementing laboratory systems’ software, return on investment is inevitably one of the key drivers. The up-front requirements to justify the expenditure are usually aligned to process improvement and productivity. In the case of Electronic Laboratory Notebooks, there’s usually a secondary, and unquantifiable requirement about improving knowledge management in the organisation by sharing and making laboratory information accessible.
Now, knowledge management (KM) is a scary topic, open to abuse and exploitation by unscrupulous vendors and consultants. The principles of KM all make good sense; it’s just that an ‘industry’ seems to have grown around the topic that sees it as a potential revenue stream. I’ve spent some time working in KM teams and with KM initiatives in my corporate career, and the conclusions that I came to were:
- KM solutions do not come in a shrink wrap box
- You cannot implement KM, it is an outcome
- KM is about people; technology can facilitate good KM, but that’s all
Basically, Information Technology is a big part of the problem, but a small part of the solution.
By complete chance I came across an article written by Elisabeth Goodman, about a company (Deep Visuals Ltd) being run by an ex-colleague of mine, Alan Payne. The article touches briefly on some of the KM outcomes from the enterprise-wide ELN implementation from our Kodak days and was a good reminder that despite the up-front concerns about the investment, longer term benefits accrue from (a) sharing and making information accessible, (b) ensuring that systems are easy to use, and (c) evolving a culture based on collaboration.
Reading Elisabeth’s article caused me to check her blog, and I found a number of interesting posts that may be of interest to visitors to this site – you’ll find a link in the Blogroll in the left-hand sidebar. The item that really caught my eye was There’s more to decision making than meets the eye or.. why we shouldn’t dismiss gut feelings. Serendipity has always had a significant role in science; so many of the major scientific breakthroughs and advances originate from chance observations and things that went wrong. We often learn more from failure than success! You can’t help but wonder where we would be if Lean and Six Sigma had come along a couple of centuries earlier. That’s not to say that Lean and Six Sigma don’t have a place in science, but I side with Elisabeth in her conclusion that we need to keep some reasonable space for right brain thinking alongside the systematic and structured approaches that strive to attain increased efficiency and productivity.
As a footnote, I’ve just finished reading a novel, The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt. It is an entertaining literary mystery based on the life of Nikola Tesla, an outstanding but somewhat neglected 20th century inventor. Pure right brain!
