“DevCon” is nerdy developer-speak for “Developer’s Conference” so it’s definitely not a conference to attend if you’re merely interested in using the iPad in your lab.

I wanted to point-out that one of the speakers is from a place called “Big Nerd Ranch” and, as someone that does program, I particularly thought that sounded intriguing. 

Well, last week I managed to lay hands on an iPad for the first time, albeit only for a few minutes, but it was enough to create some initial thoughts about the potential (or otherwise) of the device in the laboratory. My initial reaction was one of familiarity; as an iPhone user the interface and interactions were very familiar, although seeing Apple software such as iWorks installed was a reminder that this is a different device. By and large the experience was very similar to using an iPhone, but on a grander scale. The success of the iPhone, and the iPod, have been dependent on a couple of key factors; firstly they just look cool (but acknowledging that beauty is in the eye of the beholder!), and secondly they offer a ‘solution’ rather than just a device. The nature of the dedicated ‘Apps’ approach, and the associated service through iTunes just makes life easy when it comes to finding and installing applications. In order to make the iPad a success in the laboratory, just porting an application or running it in a browser will probably not be enough; it will need a tailored application that takes full advantage of the specific features of the device.

The other thing that struck me was the form factor. Falling between a laptop and a mobile phone in size, it is quite portable, but with Apple’s characteristic smooth finish, it feels a bit slippery and needs to be handled carefully. Furthermore, it falls somewhere between a laptop and a mobile phone in ease of use. A laptop needs to be placed on a reasonably firm surface (a lap?) to making typing manageable. An iPhone can be held comfortably in one hand, while you swipe and prod with the other. In principle, it is the same with an iPad, but the size of the device makes it a bit of a handful, and I would imagine that any serious typing would require the iPad to be laid on a surface. However, in the world of pens and paper we learned to handle clipboards, so I suppose we’ll figure a way to cope with an iPad for some rudimentary input. What did strike me was the convenience of the device for reading, and here it was rather like carrying/holding a thin book, somewhat less intrusive than a laptop, but with a decent size screen, a far more convenient size for reading than a phone. I suspect the accessories market will be looking to exploit opportunities around handling and protecting the iPad to get around some of the minor inconveniences.

So overall, does that make the iPad a potential replacement for a paper lab notebook? Time will tell; if suitable applications are tailored for the device; if the form factor is not a restriction; if the ‘closed’ or controlling nature of Apple’s approach to applications is not a hinderance, and if corporate IT policies will accommodate this type of device, well then, maybe…….

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.

As the ELN market has developed, an ever increasing number of laboratories can rightly claim to be ‘electronic’; the introduction of an ELN generally eliminates paper from any transactional and archival role in the laboratory. But being ‘electronic’ is not the same as being ‘integrated’, since most of our labs contain a collection of systems that were not necessarily designed to work together in a truly integrated way. Yet we all harbour a vision of an integrated environment that enables us to easily interconnect instruments and systems and provide seamless access to data and information to support the scientific and business requirements of our organisations.

Sadly, we are a long way from achieving this vision, and this is a concern that has been repeatedly expressed for years. Moving towards an ‘open’ approach in terms of platforms, applications and data standards in order to realise this vision requires a driving force and a community effort. Over the years there have been several worthy attempts to address some aspects of these issues, mainly concerning data interchange standards, but the reality is that little has been achieved. As a community, we have never gained sufficient collective visibility or inertia to challenge the vendors over proprietary solutions. In the parallel universe of the clinical laboratory, there is some positive movement towards integration, driven by a common cause: medical records. Although there is still a long way to go to get through the technical and political quagmire in order to achieve harmony, usable standards are emerging. The general laboratory world doesn’t have the same sort of ‘third-party’ driving force to demand compliance across the industry. We might speculate that a regulatory agency could have the capability of driving change, but right now that doesn’t seem to be high on the priority list.

So if we, as an unorganised community, don’t have the inertia, and we can’t depend on a 3rd party to solve the problem for us, can we turn to technology for help? Over the past few years, and almost exclusively associated with Web 2.0, the technology trend has been towards providing tools for collaboration and integration. Hence my question about integration in the light of the growing trend towards SaaS application offerings, and whether we in the laboratory world can benefit from this much wider trend.

So how does this link to the other question about conferences? If you read the thread you will see that there is a growing concern about the viability of relatively expensive conferences, both from a vendor and delegate viewpoint, once the subject matter has progressed through the hype cycle. In other words, once the subject has become mainstream, most of the questions have been answered, and the on-going requirement is mainly about education rather than debate. This appears now to be the case for ELNs; the same thing happened with LIMS some years ago. But I contend that the next issue is Laboratory Integration. It is a time for debate and action, but is a ‘conference’ the right debating chamber? It seems to me that an independent and open forum that represents the interests of users and open-minded vendors, would be a far more suitable mechanism for making progress. It appears to be a paradox that at a time when communication and collaboration have reached unprecedented levels, that we have not taken full advantage of this capability to work together as a community to achieve a win-win.

But I was just having a conversation with someone regarding how much the on-line tools can or cannot replace the in-person venues and something came to mind:      I haven’t noticed any webinars given by end-users.

Some of us in the industry have had conversations in various places regarding the fact that end-users can be biased in their presentations just as those of us selling things are, but here’s the issue – the conferences we would attend in-person tend to try to get a variety of speakers. Not all of them make this effort, but I’d claim that’s true of a good portion of them. Thus, if you see a variety of speakers, from end-users to software vendors to consultants, if each is biased toward their own ideas and area, by seeing what each has to present, you’ll be able to compare their ideas that overlap to see where the truth lies.

If end-users never give a webinar, we can never get their point of view to weigh-in with the others. And, regardless how educational a webinar is, it’s a common marketing tactic to give away a webinar in order to promote one’s software products and/or services, which means it has that much more potential bias built-in.

As such, I have a problem with the notion that we would stop attending conferences in-person and rely entirely on webinars. It’s not that anyone has come out and said exactly that (that I know of), but I think there are some conversations leading in that direction.

The sad reality is that they seem to be talking about the same things we talk about coming out of each conference: the future of the various laboratory informatics tools, how to integrate these tools, how mature these tools are, and similar topics. These are the same topics that come out of each conference, year-after-year-after-year. Last week, speaking with some other consultants in the industry, we were noting that a good number of the presentations at conferences are just the same old talks we’ve seen for years, merely given by a different person. Each person thinks they’ve discovered something new, gives their presentation, we all sit and watch, and nothing happens to change the industry.

In fact, the only reason I find this conference notable isn’t the topics, of course – it’s the level of excitement and interest coming out of it. If people stay interested and discuss these issues throughout the year, there’s a potential for change. I think the key is that there was some combination of people, or possibly the way the conference was run, but some other key factor that got people talking about the topics and excited-enough to carry that out of the conference.

So, although the conference topics are important, especially to those people so new they’ve not seen them, before, I would say that all conferences are not equal. For example, every conference has presentations on how to have a successful project implementation, but we continue to have a high rate of project failures. A handful of people going to a conference don’t solve that problem. But if those people share their excitement and certainty about how projects must be run, they influence the others that can’t afford to attend or might not have known about the conference.

As is so often the case, I’d point to the books such as “Tribes” and “Here Comes Everybody” to explain why an event can have this kind of influence and cascade effect. So, the next time you attend a conference, if you shove your conference manual on your bookshelf and go back to business-as-usual, you’re not even doing yourself any good. Instead, get out into our community and start sharing that knowledge. Often, you’ll get more back than you gave.

http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/08/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking-question-5-of-5/

On-line social networking and the media that now makes it possible are a hot topic among many factions of our industry, from software vendors that want to interact with their customers and get them timely information, to the companies that make products and want to assist their researchers in sharing information and techniques, to give just a couple examples.

The US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has announced a public hearing for the use of social media with regard to promoting medical devices:

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-22618.htm

How long will it be before they take on social media in other regulated areas? How long will it be before other regulatory agencies across the world start this same effort? Only time will tell.

http://outonalims.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/in-boston-laboratory-informatics-is-important-but-people-still-matter/

From going to give a free talk for a colleague to attending the Boston LIMS/Laboratory Informatics meeting, yesterday was a pretty good day. Both those events got me more information and excitement than I get from my on-line discussions or my e-mail.

A couple days ago, John Trigg was talking about conferences, YET AGAIN, in:

http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/09/conferences-again/

In fact, you’ll notice he and I talk quite a bit about getting out to conferences and how important that is. If you search TheIntegratedLab’s postings, you’ll find this out.

As I’ve said, before, I realize that many of you have had budget cuts that prevent you from going to the big conferences, but they don’t prevent you from going to local meetings. For example, in the Boston area, alone, there’s LIMS/Laboratory Informatics, ACS (American Chemical Society), ALMA (Association of Laboratory Managers), LRIG (Laboratory Robotics Interest Group). That’s just a very few of them! And, while a few do charge a modest fee, most of them are free to attend.

Just in the LIMS/Laboratory Informatics group, alone, we’ve had great speakers on biobanking LIMS, ELN issues, Wikis as LIMS, and on how to learn to run better laboratory informatics projects. The excitement at some of our meetings way surpasses the interest we show in any our our on-line discussions.

So, the on-line discussions are great for sharing information but just don’t have the same element of “chemistry” you get when interested people get together.

http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/07/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking/

In that post, I started the discussion by posting 5 common questions people ask about on-line social networking’s use for the lab. I already wrote about the first four:

http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/07/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking-question-1-of-5/

http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/07/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking-question-2-of-5/

http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/08/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking-question-3-of-5/

http://theintegratedlab.com/2009/08/should-your-lab-care-about-on-line-social-networking-question-4-of-5/

Here, I will write about the last one. So, if the utter suspense was killing you, here’s the final installment.  ;-)

Question # 5:    If I get involved with on-line social networking, do I need to bother coming to ALMA (Association of Laboratory Manager) or other in-person meetings, anymore?  (Information on ALMA is found at:    http://www.labmanagers.org/home/index.shtml )

Answer:

Yes. In-person networking is the most powerful networking. You get the best information from people and form the strongest bonds with them. On-line networking is good when you don’t have someone to help you, but is not as strong. Here’s why:

When you meet people, in-person, you get to know them, and they get to know you. You develop a more personal bond. People you meet in-person and truly know are more likely to help you than strangers or than people you you’ve never met face-to-face. People you know are more likely to help you than people you don’t know. People you know are more likely to trust you than people you don’t. You also have a better idea if you can trust their answers if you ask a person you know than when you ask a lot of faceless people in an on-line forum.

Because you can’t see each others facial expressions and body language, it is much more difficult to build trust in the on-line communities. It takes many more interactions to build these on-line relationships than the ones you develop, face-to-face.

So, by combing the two, that is to say, by combing the in-person meetings you attend with the on-line groups you belong to, you make your network of people larger, and you make it more likely you’ll be able to get assistance when you need it.

A lesson I learned very early in my career was that you just do not computerise a manual process. A whole department in which I worked fell victim to a misguided and misdirected effort to replace a paper-based sample logging system with a computerised version. The new system replicated the paper process, with all of its limitations; same workflow, same forms. There was no pretence at designing anything; the outcome was a system that users hated; offered nothing new or better, and caused three or four years of mayhem.

I’ve recently experienced the other extreme, switching from a windows-based smart phone to an iPhone. Now, the iPhone does hardly anything that the Windows phone couldn’t, but it’s the way it does it that makes the difference – a classic case of good design maximising usability.

So, how good is laboratory software design, and what would be a good indicator of good design? I can’t help feeling that the ultimate indicator would be no need for a user manual or a training course. Unlikely I know, but we can dream!

I don’t know what effort laboratory software vendors put into design and usability – it would be great to hear from them – but usability, and hence user acceptance, is always a criterion that is held up as a measure of a project’s success. But sometimes it just seems that user acceptance is an outcome of the training program.