The Blog for People Who Risk Life and LIMS on a Daily Basis
…nor is Thermo Sample Manager, Symyx ELN or any of the products I normally talk about. As you might or might not have noticed, I take an interest in market share, which products are popular, what categories of products exist and similar topics. Each geographic area is different and, here in Cleveland, people using these types of products appear to be almost non-existent.
As I sometimes do, I am writing this post based on the search phrase that found this blog “how to quit a project”, “can consultants quit without notice” and “quitting a project.
Last night, I attended a meeting of the Cleveland IEEE. There were four 15-minute talks. One of the presentations had to do with the proliferation of the free tools that are available for use. This leads me to discuss “disruptive technology” and whether I think we’ll be “disrupted” by free tools anytime, soon. Interesting Tools … Read moreWhen Will “Disruptive Software” Hit Laboratory Informatics?
Earlier this week, I began a series of blog posts focused on the software selection process. Tuesday, I provided you with articles that would get those of you started who plan to do it themselves. Wednesday, I discussed some of what HAS changed in our industry. Yesterday, I mentioned some of the terms used in our industry and why they aren’t that useful. Today’s post talks about the places people get stuck when they do this, themselves, and mentions a new services offering from GeoMetrick Enterprises.
There are a few good discussions going on in the LinkedIn LIMS/Laboratory Informatics group and I wanted to bring your attention to those if you don’t keep-up with that group.
Our industry’s magazines do post some number of articles about software products, even though customers of the software might not think there are enough of these articles and, actually, some of the articles aren’t worth reading. However, I don’t think I’ve seen any articles in the big magazines (or even the smaller journals) about the services vendors in our industry.
I’m finished with the Laboratory Data Management USA 2010 conference and taking a flight to Amsterdam later today to head toward the next conference. Doing a wrap-up of the conference is hard. So much has happened that I don’t know where to start.
On projects, I tend to find that customers are: A) Afraid to have too many experts, thinking they’ll contradict each other and fight; B) Think having a lot of experts mean they’ll get a great end-product with no intervention; C) Know that both (A) and (B) are both partly true and partly false.
Yesterday, the GeoMetrick Enterprises’ monthly company newsletter was issued. August’s topic was about data sharing (to subscribe: http://www.geometrick.com/newsltr_signup.htm ). Just as with the last few months, the percentage of people reading this month’s newsletter was relatively high. I commented on this statistic in the blog, last month (http://outonalims.com/2010/07/02/comments-on-statistics/ ), but I’m still pondering the reason for the suddenly high reading rates. This month, however, I’ve received enough e-mails to comment on the topic of sharing data and what a chore it is that I’m convinced this topic is of particular interest.
A couple days ago, I wrote about “shifting the blame” – the tendency projects seem to have of fostering the need for its team members to spend their time looking for others to push blame and problems onto. In writing that post, I got into my project manager mode – I was thinking about how if we’d just create sensible project plan, stick to it, work together, etc…, how well it would all go – how much progress we could make.