Who Are Our Industry Influencers?

The conversation

6 comments from 3 people, December 23 to December 28, 2015. Gloria replied 2 times.

1. December 23, 2015

   Thomas Vaughan

   You either name everybody you ever met or risk forgetting somebody and offending them.

   People who have made an effort to influence the industry and not just their own business or product:
   - Joe Liscouski of the Institute for Lab Automation

   Historically:
   - Gerst Gibbon
   - Richard Mahaffey of Tennessee Eastman

2. Gloria MetrickAuthor

   Gerst and Rich did a lot for our industry for many years with groups such as the LIMS Institute, for example.

   Also, for someone who did a lot for our industry and without regard to personal recompense, is John Trigg. He's now retired but he did so much for LIMS, ELN and he started theIntegratedLab.com (now defunct) as a volunteer effort and invited industry experts along to work in that space ( https://uk.linkedin.com/in/johntrigg ). He was part of the LIMS Institute, won the LIMS Award and was critical in the LIMS efforts of the RCS (Royal Chemical Society). I feel privileged to have worked in a period of time when he was active at Kodak, where we on different projects, but where John always had inspiring observations about the Kodak projects, in general.

   Also, for years, Rich Lysakowski worked on CENSA (Collaborative Electronic Notebook Association) and I don't know if the recent push toward ELN/LES/etc.. has rewarded his efforts but we owe of lot of it to him, regardless. This link no longer seems to work, but here's his old organizational link: http: //www.censa.org

   We should thank Stu Miller for his ongoing decades of work with the LIMS/Laboratory Informatics discussion group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lims-lab-inf

   As a consultant, I'm going to say that Tom Peters, with his ongoing books, movies and blog have affected the way I see consulting: http://tompeters.com/ Ditto to Gerald Weinberg, a true consultant's consultant ( http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Home.html ). Both are people who tried to insprire us all to be better thinks, better consultants and to create better value-added services to our customers.

   Also, the many consultants I've met along the way, too numerous to put their links, here.

   Plus, the many customers I've worked with - I'm probably not allowed to mention their names for privacy/NDA reasons, but they influence me every day, as well as truly inspire me to learn and be a better person and consultant and to love their products all the more. They work so hard, especially the LIMS system admins, that I can't stop thinking about the fact that our world really wouldn't continue to plug along without them.

3. December 26, 2015

   John H. Jones

   Don't forget Helen Gillespie. Her limsource site was a great value to the industry. Unfortunately, so many of the influences are gone and defunct. The limslist exists but there has been no discussions in years and the limsource is no more and it too has been gone for years and the LIMS institute also has been gone for years but everyone of these initiatives helped shape our industry and improve it. It is well worth acknowledging and mentioning those great efforts.

   1. December 27, 2015

      Gloria MetrickAuthor

      Although LIMSource is gone, I think Helen Gillespie is still around and writing but that LIMSource was purchased by someone and she now writes for whatever periodical or source purchased it. However, since I haven't been reading it, I can't compare it to the LIMSource nor do I remember the details.

4. December 28, 2015

   lemoene

   Though useful information can be found and contributed to at LinkedIn, speed-reading with hot air and ambush-marketing detectors on, and as with your examples Gloria, one should not look to be influenced much by it, as little as in one's private life by Facebook?

   Theranos, in the headlines for all the wrong reasons at the moment - https://goo.gl/xU82Rd - and also, to my liking, too much front page hype, bubble blowing, power-dressing and make-up, but Elizabeth Holmes' vision for transforming health care diagnostics by "making actionable health information accessible to everyone as a basic human right, at the time it matters", is pointing the way.

   At the same time regrettable influencers, like those selling data belonging to patients in their "interoperability" schemes, and the shameless new-colonial bio-pirates plying their thievery in Africa, stoke the fire in the bellies of many lab-informatics professionals who already moved to the post-capitalist sharing world.

   A lot can be learned from various FOSS gurus wrt Living Systems and applied to lab informatics. Pieter Hintjens is a personal favourite, see http://goo.gl/rLBNZG, his bio at http://goo.gl/cQo0oH.

5. John H. Jones

   I guess staying on-topic with who actually influences our industry and specifically who influences me, I would simply have to point to my clients. They are the ones with the needs and requirements and so they get the credit for the influence in the world in which I live.

   Speaking personally, I cannot and do not innovate in a vacuum. It is driven by necessity and it is the needs of the clients that influence and drive our activities and innovations. I cannot point to a single entity outside of my clients that really influences me in the LIMS industry.

   I think the more visionary folks are in other industries. Our LI industry pretty much follows rather than leads.

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