The Elephant in the Room
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
In the United States, the term “the elephant in the room” is a term that means that we have something obvious that everyone is ignoring. In our laboratory informatics industry, our “elephant” that we seem to like to avoid talking about is the merging of our industry – the fact that we are undergoing a huge change, where software products no longer fit into the neat categories we’ve created for them and where one of our top three problems as an industry is that of integrating all the software together.
Considering all this, one would think we’d be eager to come together as an industry to make the path of integration easier for the customers or, at the least, easier to understand the issues about integration. However, it’s tough to find people to tackle this topic.I understand when customers who work in a specific area can only spend their time and money working with that particular type of software, but for the global companies, they are dealing with the incredibly difficult topic of integration and of keeping-up with the changes to our industry. But for those of us actually in the industry, we remain siloed (if you read the newsletter in January, that was exactly the topic, if you were just thinking this seems familiar). We talk about integration, then go off to do it alone. Since we are all competing with each other, maybe that will never change, but if it doesn’t, I think we will continue to struggle with these constant changes.
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/