Those of us charged with the task of wrestling with the intricacies of LIMS, ELNs and SDMs in the relentless pursuit of the perfect laboratory technology environment, sometimes find that it is easy to forget that the basic reason we’re doing this is to make scientists, and their organisations happy, efficient and productive in their eternal quest for greater scientific knowledge and understanding.  An article that appeared in this past weekend’s edition of The Observer/The Guardian, Chemistry: the Unsung Hero of Science, drew attention to the fact that 2011 is the International Year of Chemistry. With due respect to practitioners of other scientific disciplines, this serves as a timely reminder of our mission.

Of course, those of you who suspected I would eventually follow-up with a plea to participate probably:

• Are great guessers.
• Have the sixth sense.
• Know me too well.

Unfortunately, after posting the Dilbert cartoon commenting on some forms of participation, I feel a bit shy about making my plea:
http://theintegratedlab.com/2010/12/more-on-the-lack-of-participation/

Okay, but not shy-enough to refrain. So, here’s my pitch:
Do you hear people complain or do you yourself complain about the lack of information, the bad information, or the outright lies you find when going to find information? Then, this is your great opportunity to make a strike against it – participate in TheIntegratedLab.com. It’s a cheap way to participate in our industry’s information exchange. It doesn’t take much time. You don’t have to agree with us. Unless your comment is totally outrageous, it will probably get fairly quickly approved. If you truly have regrets about your comment, you could probably even get one of us to remove it.

In fact, if you have your own posting to make, that could be another form of participation. By responding and sharing information in this manner, you’re showing to others that you’ve found something interesting about this site. It helps encourage others to read and to potentially participate, too. After all, the more people that participate, the more comfortable others feel in participating, too. Additionally, John Trigg created this site as a place to share and participate with each other. It’s not just a place for John and I to push our ideas onto all of you, but your chance to posts yours, too, to challenge us, and to share what you’ve got to share.

It’s much like that in our industry – that there are so many events to attend, articles to read, and other pieces of information to gather, that one person cannot attend to them all. Additionally, some of it isn’t worth bothering with either because it’s not new, doesn’t apply to us, is misleading, or is just plain wrong; but I’ve had a couple similar experiences to the one about from the children’s charity, but within this industry when I’ve said “no” to participating in one thing or another. We all have our pet projects and we don’t like to think they’re not the be-all/end-all for everyone else, too.

Thus, those of us that create some of these areas or information occasionally begin to think that no-one cares. Just because people don’t participate doesn’t mean they don’t care. It could mean that they’re busy, they’re planning to post when they think of something extremely critical to say, or any other number of factors. Additionally, when I’m looking at some of these areas, I balance the quality of the information disseminated by them with the overall participation level.

With that said, I don’t want to suggest that high participation means that people are getting value from the area, nor that they’re even reading it (as I’ve seen some posts where the person clearly didn’t read what they were responding to).

As I often do, I want to point-out that Web 2.0 empowers us so that we can all drive the feed information, but being empowered doesn’t mean people are required to do it. The only real change is that we CAN do more not that we DO do it.

ALMA (Association of Laboratory Managers) Beanpot (New England) Chapter
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
10 a.m. – Noon
Meeting site:   Millipore Corporation in Bedford Massachusetts
Web-site Link:  http://www.labmanagers.org/about/chapters.shtml

A Brief Summary

“Often, we speak of our data as a database table and field. As this book points out, data in a database isn’t interesting or useful. People only care about “data on the move” or data that is being used. For everyone who thinks their data is excellent when it is 99% correct, who talks about a data strategy or who over-casually makes plans to do “data mining” this is a book worth reading. It is explained in a manner that everyone can read and understand it. At the same time, it carefully lays-out the problems with our data and our plans to use it, as well as lists of issues to consider in order to make better use of this data.”

The Issues, Examples and Solutions

The book covers the issues that prevent data sharing. First of all, it reduces a person’s power to share their data. There are privacy and security issues. The data that one person works with and cares about is different than the data another group might benefit from and that’s not always apparent. The book addresses all these issues. It gives examples on privacy and security policy issues, that you can’t make it so difficult to get data that people can’t get at it, but that there are procedures to follow to make sure the data doesn’t get into the wrong hands. Or, there’s the issue that different people and groups need and want to see the data in different ways. He includes excellent and simple examples to illustrate his points.

Our Problem

One issue the author mentions is that a computer, well, it “computes.” It manages the routine. Data is managed when it comes from routine processes. Here’s a key for us. We’re always running into problems when we discuss the non-routine work such as ad-hoc samples, non-routine testing, etc… This is where our industry seems to have the most trouble finding a good way to manage and mine that data. We’re coming up with more strategies for it, but even this expert points to this as difficult.

It’s not unreasonable for us to try to capture and use this data but maybe it is true that we’re using a computer for something which it doesn’t handle particularly well – the unexpected and non-routine. If we recognize that as the challenge, we can work to overcome it.

More details on CNN.

Somewhere here in TheIntegratedLab.com, John and I talked about books such as “Here Comes Everybody” by Clay Shirky and “Tribes” by Seth Godin. I’d like to thank John for mentioning “Tribes” which I have only just finished reading and based on his recommendation.

“Here Comes Everybody” speaks more to the point regarding how the ways in which the ordinary person can organize something has changed. We’re now empowered to organize things. “Tribes” is directed more toward how we now must, as the old saying goes “Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way.” It gives examples as to how important it is that we make a choice which we should do and can do, and then to do whatever it is that we think is the right choice. In this way, we will have the leaders we need and the followers that are required to give those leaders a “movement.”

More on the Topic of Change

Additionally, a friend of mine just gave me a link to a presentation on the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) web-site called “The Future of Work” http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/229 which is based on a book by the same name by a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Thomas W. Malone. The presentation was recorded on June 5^th, 2004.

In the talk, Malone states that he feels we’re at the beginning of a change in the way we work. As with Shirky’s book and with John’s humorous posting of the medieval help desk, he also points to the printing press. In his case, he uses it as an example of a significant way in which communications have become and continue to become cheaper, making information available to almost everyone in the organization in order to make decisions.

He asks the question, “How much of the energy, creativity, intelligence of the people in our organization could we take advantage of?” What percentage of that potential do you think that your company uses? He asks the audience to tell him and he claims that he normally averages 30%. In the MIT audience, it was closer to 50%.

Have You Seen the Change?

In your organization, what percentage do you think it is? Do you think your vision is different from the laboratory than it would be in other parts of the organization?

TheIntegratedLab.com welcomes your thoughts on this in the Comments section of this posting. So, jump in and tell us what you think about what you’ve seen or haven’t seen.

http://www.atlab.com/

http://www.agilent.com/about/newsroom/presrel/2009/27jul-gp09016.html

Gloria