LIMS and ELN Progress
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
I just had a brief e-mail exchange with someone about the future of LIMS and ELN, and the outcome was an urge for more information on the future of them.
Upon more thought, I realized that there isn't much new to say. Some companies will still manage both standalone LIMS and standalone ELNs, while others will manage combination systems. Whether we call them LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System), ELN (Electronic Laboratory Notebook), LES (Laboratory Execution System), SDMS (Scientific Data Management System) or something else probably will remain muddled for years to come.
The other thing that came out of the brief e-mail exchange was that the other person happened to mention that their company's solution had been worked-out by a specific person. It struck me that that is the key. Each company has to have someone who understands enough that they can figure out the solution to this LIMS/ELN/LES/SDMS puzzle. The larger the company, the more puzzling it will be. If your company does not have such a person or a small team who can work together to share their expertise to work this out, this is where the conferences come in handy.
While the conferences do tend to have the same information year-after-year and often the same speakers giving the same information, this information is great to those people who have not heard it, before. While it's not enough to solve the puzzle, it's enough to get you started thinking about how to go about it. It's also going to help you make other contacts who can help you. Users are sometimes helpful to other users who are going to do similar projects to their own, often giving the new users help past merely meeting at the conference.
The bottom line, though, is still that this is always quite a lot of work for someone, sometimes a person you hire as a long-term resource, other times a consultant like myself who comes in to work through the puzzle as the pieces become available. It will often cost a great deal of money, either internal "funny" money or external "hard" money. Progress is made through hard work, expertise, persistence, and often even some politics, which we don't like but can't avoid.
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/