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.

But getting back to the point, locating computers in the laboratory is not new; we’ve been doing it for 40 years or so, and its getting easier. Flat screens, mounted on telescopic arms, membrane keyboards, on slide-away trays, and use of KVM devices to switch the desk-bound processor between use at the desk or in the lab, have all helped. Of course this doesn’t overcome the basic mobility of a paper notebook, and it remains to be seen whether mobile electronic devices will have any impact on laboratory work. Already there are ELNs that are iPad-ready; there’s a major LIMS vendor that has been advertising for some while, a LIMS running on an iPhone. It is possible that these mobile devices may offer the possibility of capturing data, notes and ideas that can be synced back to a laboratory system so that the chore of sitting down and fully documenting an experiment can be conducted in an office environment.

But what if…..we were to use multimedia, rather than just text and images, to record experiments, or if the laboratory became a ‘Minority Report’ example of ubiquitous computing???? It may be some way away, but I suspect its not the ELN that is doomed.

The other news item appeared on the BBC website: ‘MI5 staff who lack computer skills made redundant’. (MI5 is the UK counter-intelligence service). In a round of compulsory and voluntary redundancies, MI5 staff lacking IT skills are being told that they are not wanted. Counter-terrorism is increasingly dependent on technology and officers have to adapt to keep up and to be completely comfortable using computers and the latest technology. This would never happen in a laboratory, would it?

I’m reminded of an unsubstantiated story from a few years ago, of a company that chose to implement an ELN by equipping their scientists with tablet devices, but were dismayed to find that the tablet proved to be a convenient tray for carrying samples around the laboratory. Apart from a smaller form factor, the typical Apple glossy surface and the lack of a protective rim, the iPad is unlikely to become a laboratory tray purely on safety grounds.

The LIMS market has reached a sufficient level of maturity that (I suspect) we all know what a LIMS is, and what it does. The same is not true for ELNs. For most people, an ELN is far more than a replacement for the paper lab notebook; it needs to provide the generic capability that the paper notebook provides, but it also needs to replace the traditional cut and paste (scissors and tape) with sophisticated electronic interfaces to other laboratory systems and processes that serve specific laboratory disciplines such as chemistry, biology and analytical or Q/A. As such, the authoring tool at the hub of an “ELN’ is the equivalent of the paper lab notebook, and everything else becomes a number of integration challenges that collectively represent an electronic, or integrated lab.

One of these integration challenges is of course the LIMS, and for most organisations an interface between the LIMS and the ELN is a key requirement. The LIMS does all of the sample and test management, based around structured data; the ELN handles the unstructured and discipline-specific data. But the ELN market became a bit fuzzy with a small number of products (QA-ELNs) that were labelled as ELNs, but functionally were closer to a LIMS, albeit with a different type of workflow. The products were essentially built around an SOP-driven workflow that presented the user with the test procedure. Test results could then be added to the appropriate fields in the procedure, either manually, or by a direct instrument interface. Of course, a more typical ELN could be configured with templates that are able to replicate this type of workflow, so one of the impacts of the specialised QA-ELNs was to cause the mainstream ELN vendors to respond with this type of functionality. Having kept very much in the background, suddenly the LIMS vendors, saw the opportunity to extend their products to embrace the QA-style workflow by adding a layer of functionality to provide either a procedural driven approach, or to accommodate the unstructured data that is associated with an experiment.

The outcome then is, if you are looking for a QA-ELN, there are three options; firstly to go with a specialised ELN dedicated to QA, secondly choose a mainstream ELN that offers a QA module, or thirdly choose a LIMS with ELN functionality. There’s no easy answer to this since your organisation’s specific requirements and existing infrastructure will have a big influence, but…..

If you do not already have a LIMS or an ELN, and compliance is a big issue for you, you will probably want to look at the specialised QA-ELNs. If you need to accommodate multiple disciplines in your ELN (chemistry, biology, QA, etc) then the mainstream vendors that offer a product with discipline-specific modules may be your first port of call. And if you already are a customer of a LIMS vendor who is now offering an ELN extension, then their systems may be the first to check out.

But perhaps the real issue here is our application-centric view of laboratory systems. The move by ELN vendors and LIMS vendors to offer a suite of functionality that operates on a single platform makes good sense. And if the platform were not proprietary, then it would make even better sense.

The course presented at SmartLabs Exchange outlined a systemic approach to automation, tracing its evolution from the days when quantitative chromatography was based on cutting out peaks and weighing them, to current requirements for integrating disparate laboratory instruments, systems and robotics into a unified laboratory ‘solution’. Considerable emphasis was placed on process and workflow understanding, the choice of technology infrastructure and the role that systems such as LIMS and ELNs can play in facilitating integration. From a manager’s perspective, the introduction of laboratory automation is equivalent to introducing a small scale ‘scientific manufacturing’ operation and therefore warrants appropriate policies and practices. Good planning plays a critical role in the deployment of laboratory automation, based on well-defined goals and business justification.

The course provided an excellent overview of strategic approach to laboratory automation. Full details of the public course schedule offered by the Institute for Laboratory Automation can be found here.

With regard to the technical content of the meeting, one of the underlying themes was the continuing debate about the overlap between LIMS and the growing number of ‘Q/A ELNs’. Presentations from LabWare, Velquest, LabVantage and Waters tackled this issue head-on. It is interesting to note that after staying away from the ELN market for some years, a number of LIMS vendors are now adding ELN functionality to their products to move into this market space. The underlying strategy seems to be one of offering existing (LIMS) customers the ability to extend their implementations by adding ELN functionality, rather than purchasing a separate ELN system and facing the subsequent interfacing issue. This approach has its strengths and weaknesses which I’ll look into in another post.

For the first time in one of these meetings I sat through a workshop on Software as a Service(SaaS). SaaS is currently in the hype cycle when it comes to laboratory systems. But with an increasing number of commercial offerings and some potentially significant benefits to customers, it is becoming increasingly important to get some clarity around the benefits and limitations.

Laboratory automation, as an ‘engineering’ function, got a good exposure, and I’ll put together a separate post or two on this topic. The concern is that there is very little formal education that specifically addresses this topic, despite the fact that it represents a significant challenge for most laboratories.

My participation included a workshop on the subject of ‘Managing User Resistance’; here’s my slides.

Overall this was a good and enjoyable meeting and a refreshing change from the more passive style of conference that serves the laboratory integration market.

There were a couple of points that did arise in the formal programme that are worth recording. The legal implications of ELNs has been a feature of ELN conferences since they first started. Generally the theme of the presentations has been the reassurance to potential purchasers of ELN systems that electronic records are acceptable in patent litigation and interference cases. There were two presentations in the SMi conference relating to legal issues of ELNs, firstly by Colin Sandercock and then by Matthew Dick (Bristows). Colin’s presentation focused primarily on the situation in the US, whereas Matthew gave an overview of the UK situation, plus some insights into the broader European situation. Surprisingly, there is no harmonization regarding discovery/disclosure relating to electronic records across the European Union.

The most significant message that came from the two presentations was a subtle change of emphasis from ‘it’s perfectly OK to use electronic records in court’ to ‘there are some distinct benefits to using electronic records’. The benefits accrue mainly with the enhanced speed and accuracy of searching electronic records. Since the number of records presented in the discovery phase can be significant, computerised search tools can significantly shorten the time to extract relevant data, and hence reduce costs.

The other presentation that was of particular interest was by Jo Mulgrew of Pfizer. Jo gave a detailed description of the support structure that Pfizer have put in place for a range of laboratory applications. The support system is based on ‘compliance’ of user adoption and uses a range of ‘Enterprise 2.0’ tools during and after implementation to optimise roll out and the on-going user experience of the application. I’m hoping, in due course, to post more details of Pfizer’s approach to in-house support as it seems to represent a benchmark and may offer some best practice ideas to other organisations.