It’s been a long time since I didn’t have an electronic information device that I carry around in my pocket, not counting calculators. I recall that I bought my first credit card sized Personal Information Manager called the REX in 1998. This marvel could store detailed information about family, friends and business associates, entered by plucking with a stylus. It was possible to synchronize with information from Outlook or Lotus Notes. But that was flaky and often resulted in loss of data. The Palm Pilot appeared shortly thereafter and had apps that enabled one to synchronize reliably with Outlook/Notes as well as other kinds of information from your PC like Microsoft Office documents and PDF files.

The first cell phones that had some PDA capabilities appeared beginning in 1996 with the Nokia 9000 but their capabilities did not come close to those that the Palm had. So I carried the smallest “plain” cell phone available in my pocket along with the Palm. As the cellular networks became more sophisticated, the ability to surf the net became possible. Phones as well as the Palm picked up the capability to connect to a wireless network. I kept my Palm Tungsten until it died a year ago. Why? Mostly because I could sync Quicken financial files with my PC as well as PowerPoint presentations. I can’t do that as well with my Droid phone. The Palm was easier to use and gave me updated files to review after each sync. I think that smart phones will improve, but they are not there yet

The introduction of GPS to the phone opened up a host of apps that not only navigate the road but bring in other information based on where your location is at the time. Nice! Garmin and Tom Tom may soon be a memory.

I also have had an eBook reader since 1998 (Rocket then, Sony now). Can’t carry this in your pocket. Yes you can read stuff on a large screen smart phone, but the eBooks are a much better. It’s like the camera in your phone. Great for quickies, but for good quality pictures, you really need something closer to an SLR.

Back to the point of portable electronic devices making your information management better. In order to make your smart phone more effective as an information resource, there has to be more apps that let you download/download your PC files and view/edit them. More of these are starting to appear in the last few months. The whole idea when you are away from your PC is to whip out your smart phone to review things you are currently working on. If you not away from your PC for very long, this is a moot point.  I should comment about the iPAD device. Tablet PC’s have been around for a long time. In the past they were best suited to replace a clip board in industrial applications. It will not fit in your pocket, so I look at it as an eBook reader that has extended capabilities. It will not replace my 3 pound laptop and is a little glitzier that my Sony eBook reader. I’ll pass on it for now

What’s new?

Records Management / Archiving
Gartner, Inc. has recognized EMC with a positive rating in its report entitled “MarketScope for E-Discovery Software Product Vendors.” EMC strengthened its position as a leader in the e-discovery and e-disclosure markets with the release of EMC SourceOne and its acquisition of Kazeon, a leading e-discovery vendor.

EMC Corporation announced that Documentum Records Manager6.5 has achieved Department of Defense (DoD) 5015.2-STD version 3 certification for both standard and classified records. In addition, EMC has extended the certification beyond electronic records management through the pairing of Records Manager with EMC SourceOne Email Management and EMC Centera content addressed storage system to provide customers with a certified e-mail records management solution.

ELN / LIMS
ArtusLabs, Inc. announced a partnership with the David H. Murdock Research Institute to enable research at the North Carolina Research Campus (NCRC). DHMRI’s partnership with ArtusLabs focuses on the use of the Ensemble Electronic Lab Notebook™ (E2LN™) platform.

Patent filed for ELECTRONIC VOICE-ENABLED LABORATORY NOTEBOOK
WO 2008151144 20081211
Inventors: Joseph Fanelli, San Diego, CA; Samuel Beckey, San Diego, CA; Lane Walters, Raleigh, NC.

Infosys Technologies Limited announced that it will design and implement the Research Informatics System (RISe) at Elan Pharmaceuticals, Inc, to accelerate discovery research using a path-breaking co-creation engagement model that leverages Infosys’ existing intellectual property in this field.

Charlie Sodano, PhD

Founder – eOrganizedWorld
Phone: (925) 229-1688
Cell: (925) 231-5909
email: charlie.sodano@eorganizedworld.com
www.eorganizedworld.com

Next week the focus falls on the IQPC Smart Labs Exchange meeting in Brussels.  Smart Labs offers a different approach to the more conventional conference format with an emphasis on interactive workshops and a limited number of plenary sessions.  In addition, the organisers offer pre-arranged meetings between delegates and vendors.  It’s a format that has worked well in the past, so it will be interesting to see whether it continues to succeed.

However, in the background, there still remains a question about how the laboratory informatics market collaborates.  The conferences do represent an opportunity for users, vendors and consultants to get together now and again, and chew over the various issues and developments in the industry.  If the ELN conferences go away, as well they might, these opportunities will go with them, unless, of course, we can find another means of getting interested parties together.

We’ve seen this pattern before with the International LIMS Conferences, and interestingly there still seems to be plenty to discuss about LIMS.  The ELN market is still some way from being considered mature, and when it comes to laboratory integration, we’ve hardly started!  So where do we go?  Is the conference problem one of cost (money or time)?  That’s not an unreasonable assumption.  Or is the problem content or format?  Should we persuade the conference organisers to shift the content from being application-centric and concentrate on integration issues instead?  Is it a format problem?  Would changing the format to a more interactive approach such as workshop and discussion sessions improve matters?  These seem feasible approaches, but would they just retain the same high cost formula and run the risk of low attendance?  Or is there another way, by establishing a neutral, low cost forum where people who care about the industry and have something to say, can get together from time to time?  Now there’s something to talk about in the networking opportunities in Brussels.

I can well remember witnessing projects where (a) the objective was to faithfully reproduce a paper process on a computer, and (b) there was no give and take over a specific requirement. In the first case, the project was a total failure; it reproduced fundamental flaws in the paper process and never took advantage of the capabilities of the technology. In the second case, the only way out was some very clunky customisation that was unable to survive the next software release. Clearly there are some things that we as human beings are very good at, and there are other things that computers are very good at. There’s still a way to go before these qualities are fully merged, so the more we can do to adapt to the logical capabilities of a system, rather than expect the system to adapt to our occasional illogical capabilities, the more likely we are to find a successful solution. Now that’s not to say we just give in to whatever is presented to us in the way of a computerised system, but we do need to be confident that we have a robust and logical process that we can apply the technology to.

In terms of a collaborative approach with vendors over RFPs, the issue may bear resemblance to Game Theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The basic scenario is competitive, from a financial perspective, and communication, is to some extent, driven by the passing of a document (RFP) between the two parties. In this context, achieving a win-win isn’t going to be easy.

Unfortunately the RFP process is never going to be completely open and collaborative, but that’s not to say that it cannot get better. Like many aspects of business life, standardisation, and a one-size-fits-all approach tend to eliminate the flexibility that is needed to drive good outcomes.

The graduates of this school talk enough about it and seem so tightly-linked with it, that I have finally become curious-enough to learn more about it. I figured I would share the information with all of you, at the same time. To learn more about the school, I spoke with Patrick Girard, who has been the school’s Director for ten years, and Claude Goldszmidt, GPHY Professor and Senior Consultant at Capgemini.

The GPHY School was founded in 1971. Although it was initially more geared toward engineering, it was always intended to provide a multidisciplinary curriculum, combining courses such as biology and computer science. The graduates are formed more as computer scientists, but with a strong scientific background so that they will specifically understand the issues of scientific software. The school was initially focused mainly on pharmaceuticals, biotechs and biopharms, but in 2000, it diversified to service an increased variety of other industries that are biology and health related.

90% of the students that come to GPHY have a background in Biology. The school’s success in placing their graduates comes partly from their hands-on approach to learning the discipline. Students are trained in real-life systems using professional methods, and are required to mix internships with companies along with their coursework. The students are required to spend three months of each year of study in internships for their first two years, and six months of internships for their third year of study.

Additionally, the school maintains a strong relationship both with the end-user companies, as well as the scientific software companies. In fact, many instructors are experts from the industry, who share their knowledge and first-hand expertise with these students. The school maintains links with over 500 French companies, and links with companies from other countries, as well.

Students are increasingly hired by both these categories of companies, as the school maintains ongoing relationships with these companies in order to understand what job skills are needed. Thus, the school maintains that their students, upon graduation, will have a shorter ramp-up time than students who did not receive this type of multi-disciplinary and work-study-type of training. It is the school’s goal to provide as much real-world experience and knowledge as possible to prepare their students to excel in their real-world positions.

Thank you to both Patrick and Claude for the time they gave to me to help me put this information together to share with all of you who read TheIntegratedLab.com.

* GPHY means: Genie Physiologics Informatics.

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.

Several years ago I came up with a scheme to file electronic records. All of my friends and family loved it. I even designed a template that made it easy for people to follow the scheme. About a year later, I asked one of my friends how the scheme was working out for them. It turns out that they had made it even better and were using a different template. I had created a standard which was followed by a group of people and lead to an improved version of the standard. Cool!

There are a number of organizations, such as ISO, ANSI, AIIM who produce what is termed consensus standards relating to information management. These standards are arrived at via group meetings where each concept (and each word) of a proposal are discussed and agreed to via majority consensus. I participated on a standards committee in the past and found the experience tedious. But that’s me. Most of the other participants were quite content to have long discussions on the choice of a single word. The value of these standards is that they represent a compromise of thought, which is quite different from my stair step “standard”. I like to think of the ISO type standards as a stair step landing where a lot of people can gather in agreement.
If you are new to a specific area, consensus standards are an excellent place to start.
ISO 15489:2001 states that records management includes:

• setting policies and standards;
• assigning responsibilities and authorities;
• establishing and promulgating procedures and guidelines,
• providing a range of services relating to the management and use of records;
• designing, implementing and administering specialized systems for managing records; and
• integrating records management into business systems and processes.

It doesn’t tell you how to get things to work within your environment which may have limitations, restrictions and specific areas of focus, but the outline is great.
You have got to tailor each item. For example, “setting policies and procedures”. Look at the format of policies and procedures currently being used in your organization. If you don’t use this format, people will tend to not take it seriously. It’s truly amazing how much variation there is in these formats between organizations. Some are compact and to the point and others have layers of details. There is no right or wrong, only what works.

A helpful hint for “assigning responsibilities and authorities” is to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Include all who are as excited and supportive as you are as well as those who have strong opposing views. If you exclude them, they will snipe at you relentlessly. Better to have then in the fold.

Perhaps the most important thing to have when you are establishing a new standard is the visual support of a senior manager. He/she is the one to refer to when someone asks “why are we doing this?” They will continue to complain, but will participate in the process.

What’s new?

Records Management / Archiving
Iron Mountain Inc., announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance to help promote and establish security best practices for enterprise-level cloud solutions and services.
As a corporate member, Iron Mountain will offer its technology in enterprise Storage-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other cloud solutions spanning information protection and recovery, and electronic discovery to help the Cloud Security Alliance promote best practices for all types of data stored in the cloud. Additionally, Iron Mountain will help develop and implement security standards for a range of cloud services.

According to new research by content management association AIIM, an average of 51% of the paper documents scanned by user organizations are born digital, having been output directly from a computer application with no further additions. The survey also found that 25% of scanned documents are photocopied before being sent for scanning, and that only 31% are destroyed after scanning, indicating a reluctance by users and organizations to lose sight of mission critical documents.
The AIIM report compares strategies for outsourced, centralized and distributed scanning, and concludes that there is a move back to centralized scanning operations, along with a greater investment in capture and recognition software to automate data capture and document indexing processes. Although outsourcing delivers cost and management benefits, users are concerned with the quality of indexing and the difficulty of integration back into their electronic archives.

ELN / LIMS
Symyx Technologies signed a partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. Symyx and Thermo Fisher Scientific will work closely to integrate applications, and Thermo Fisher will market and sell Symyx Notebook and Symyx Isentris decision support software with Thermo Scientific industry-leading LIMS across the world.
Abbott Laboratories announced this week that it will acquire StarLIMS Technologies for $123 million in a move designed to solidify its current presence in the diagnostic market while helping it expand into new sectors, such as forensics, microbiology, and public health.
StarLIMS specializes in web-based LIMS and other laboratory informatics systems, and has a presence in a number of markets, including life-science research, clinical, environmental, food and beverage, forensics, manufacturing, and public health.
RURO Inc.announced the release of Sciency®, new generation ELN (Electronic Lab Notebook). Beyond just “going paperless”, Sciency creates scalable, integrated research environment, enabling secure data sharing, project management, and interaction with existing systems and databases

OS-ELN is an Electronic Lab Notebook which you can freely download and use.
OS-ELN is deliberately simple; fully-fledged commercial ELNs are necessarily much more complex. As such, OS-ELN is a good teaching tool and a place for experimentation with ELN technology and concepts.
Users can sign up for an ELN, within which they can record their experiments, and you can attach files as part of an experiment. With knowledge of Zope, you can expand the system as you wish, for example to change the look & feel, to access relational databases, add other content to experiments, etc.

Charlie Sodano, PhD

Founder – eOrganizedWorld
Phone: (925) 229-1688
Cell: (925) 231-5909
email: charlie.sodano@eorganizedworld.com
www.eorganizedworld.com

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.

When I was in college one of the required courses in my field of study was metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science. Someone who studies metaphysics is called a “metaphysician”. When I first heard about metadata some years later, I immediately conjured up a magical profession where I would be called a “metadatician”. Metadata knowledge would propel me into a new reality above that of ordinary data where I would have powers to manipulate data using my supernatural skills.

Over time, I began to understand that metadata was not as glamorous as I first supposed. Its grandfather is notes which were scribbled in the margins of books by readers to identify key passages and add personal insight. Rather than fall into a funk about my fall from the supernatural, I began to realize that metadata does indeed have very special, if not magical properties.

Properly constructed metadata will give extended scope and clarity to a document. Properties such as title, date started, date completed, author, key words and custodian will be of great assistance in finding a particular document in a large repository. Metadata is information that helps to describe the context, content and structure about electronic information as well as books, photographs, audiotapes, video, etc.

Let me give you an example of how to find records buried in large collections. A classic approach to find information is to ask the supposed author or former colleagues of the author if they know where the record resides. This usually results in some vague directions that require tedious searching through either boxes of paper records or file server folders.

You may think that searching file share folders would not be that difficult, especially if they were indexed for full text searching. Full text searching may reduce the searchable pile, but might also overlook the information you are looking for. The date of completion is often a key to finding specific records and is usually not contained within the text of the document.

There are several techniques for attaching metadata to a record. Perhaps the simplest and probably most widely used method is to list the metadata in a spreadsheet (Excel) along with a description of where the record is physically located. This process can be improved by moving up to a more rigorous database system (Access, Oracle, SQL) and/or document management software. Other common ways of adding in metadata are via an html file commonly used to find information via Google or other web searching tools. I use these metadata tags to help push my site up on the top of the results list when people are looking for a records manager consultant who has experience in the pharma/biotech business and resides in the San Francisco Bay area. It works great!

Metadata tags can be attached to any Microsoft Office document and pdf file too.

What’s new?

Records Management / Archiving

CA and Acxiom Corporation announced a partnership to deliver enterprise-class on-demand Information Governance solutions. Organizations today face significant risks and challenges managing, The new cloud-based, hosted solution from CA and Acxiom offers customers an alternative to on-premise software deployments, while providing a single portal view to better manage email, archiving, litigation holds, search, records declaration, retention and disposition

Mimosa Systems Inc., announced email archiving, file archiving, and SharePoint archiving solutions support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 beginning November 30, 2009

Planned MoReq2 compliance for EMC Documentum:

• A completely transparent automated retention and disposition application called Retention Policy Services that is compliant with regulations, legal stipulations and best practices. It can be added to any supported EMC Documentum environment or as part of the fully certified EMC Documentum Records Manager.
• A physical records management application called Physical Records Services that will manage paper of microfiche records.
• Extension of retention and management capabilities to additional repositories, including third party repositories through Federated Records Services, a single system of record for content regardless of location or system.
• Records Manager, which gives users control of the entire record lifecycle according to a range of system defined policies. Records Manager is also certified as compliant with several standards in the U.S. and Australia.

ELN / LIMS
BioKM™ SaaS is intended to serve as the knowledge repository for your lab. Aside from simplifying management of your lab, BioKM also provides for easy documentation of the collective knowledge the lab will gather. Additionally, BioKM™ makes it easier to track research projects, verify its progress, as well as locate specific research related results

Systat Software, Inc. announced that it has signed an agreement with Rescentris, Inc. to globally offer their joint product, SigmaCERF ™ – an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) and knowledge management platform for life science research organizations.

Charlie Sodano, PhD
Founder – eOrganizedWorld
Phone: (925) 229-1688
Cell: (925) 231-5909
email: charlie.sodano@eorganizedworld.com
www.eorganizedworld.com

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

Within the context of laboratory data and information management, raw data tends to draw out some interesting debate along the lines of what constitutes raw data, how and where do we store it, and for how long?

Those of us involved in the business of laboratory systems and laboratory integration can be kept pretty busy with the technological challenges of acquiring, managing and storing ever increasing volumes of raw data, but behind these challenges are some more fundamental questions that need to be answered before we can even start thinking about a solution.

So, if we assume that we know what the raw data is, the decision about how long we keep it is influenced by three different considerations.

Firstly, scientists are often hoarders of data and like to hang on to raw data as basic scientific evidence, for reference purposes,  or for re-assessment in the light of future scientific or technological advances. This requirement has no definable timeframe.

Secondly, there is an ethical position, largely determined by regulatory bodies, to allow for the re-examination of data in the light of the consequences of unforeseen defects, failures or adverse effects of products or processes.  This timeframe may be determined by, or related to the lifetime of the product or process.

Thirdly, there is a business requirement to address IP protection in terms of the underlying value of the data to the business.  This may have a long timeframe if it is relevant to a patent, but could in other circumstances have a relatively short timeframe.

Making the decision on what to store and for how long has its complexities, but the combination of regulatory and legal guidance, business best practice, good technology and hopefully, common sense, is helping shape a way forward.  However, it is always good to remember that the scientific knowledge food-chain starts with the raw data, and an item by Derek Lowe (Data, Raw and Otherwise), loosely connected to ‘Climategate’ on In the Pipeline serves as a good reminder of the importance of raw data from the scientist’s perspective.