Brief thoughts on the future of scientific UIs

 Architecture, ELN Design, Industry  No Responses »
Dec 222009
 

I’m not a great fan of the term “ELN” despite the name of this blog, only because it means too many different things to many different people. As such it confuses things rather than aids communication.

Having said that, whilst I believe we’ve done a really good job in PatentSafe replacing the corporate aspects (record keeping, long term records etc.) of the Lab Notebook, scientists still need a place to work. Sometimes that’s a discipline-centric product (sometimes badged as an “ELN”, sometimes something else), sometimes Microsoft Office and other general Knowledge Worker tools.

Looking forward I can’t help but think that tools like Google Wave and WordPress (especially with 2.9′s nifty features) are the long term future. A lot of vendors have “Web based” ELNs which are nothing more than their thick-client products wrapped in a browser – which I’ve always felt is cheating.

But when you look at what people are doing with web-native UIs these days…surely the next generation of Scientific collaboration products are going to come from the blogging or Web 2.0 space, with a little chemistry added to the mix. They’re cheaper, easier to use, easier to deploy, and often more powerful than a typical thick-client “Enterprise” app – and I suspect they’re more capable of dealing with large-scale use than any of the commercial products on offer at the moment (the lack of scalability being the dirty little secret of most ELN deployments right now).

All these tools need – apart from some open mindedness – is a decent record keeping system. Which we would be happy to help with :-)

What an exciting time…

 Posted by Simon Coles at 8:33 pm

SaaS: Shelfware as a service? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

 Architecture, SaaS  1 Response »
Oct 262009
 

Interesting perspective on the whole SaaS debate on the ZDNet Between the Lines blog in their post SaaS: Shelfware as a service?.

Basically SaaS is not a magic bullet for enterprise apps, the problems associated with large complex software can’t be magicked away just because someone else runs the software for you.

Our hosted products and SaaS products are identical, as is our deployment methodology. I’d like to think we’ve put in the design time to ensure that deploying a replacement for the paper notebook is as painless as possible. That’s the result of experience and careful design, which I hope produces the same results regardless of how it’s deployed – on premises or SaaS. That some of our customers find purchasing our products as a Service is more a matter of convenience and economic preference.

 Posted by Simon Coles at 7:51 pm

Who chooses the collaboration tools?

 Architecture  No Responses »
Oct 172009
 

Andrew McAfee is spot on:

“McAfee’s Hypothesis: Within organizations, collaboration technologies are dictated by the most powerful person involved in the collaboration.”

 Posted by Simon Coles at 6:03 pm

My “Are ELNs doomed?” Presentation at IQPC

 Architecture, ELN Design, Project Management, Recent Conferences  3 Responses »
Sep 302009
 

Our marketing dept signed me up to do a presentation to the general session at IQPC in Brussels, with the rather provocative title “Are ELN projects Doomed?”. Um, thanks guys. No real guidance on what to say, but an expectation it will be provocative!

I’ve become increasingly concerned that what’s said in public forums (e.g. articles, conferences etc.) isn’t a true reflection of what’s really going on. A lot of ELN systems are being introduced based on tools companies already have (Microsoft Office being typical), and those don’t get any publicity (no vendor to push it!), and of course you never hear about the problems, disasters, and near misses!

This systemic fault in how the industry communicates is really serious – and will result in an awful lot of money being wasted, and our credibility damaged – just because people think doing X is the safe way (for any given value of X), but in fact the case study they’ve seen was the only one where X has worked and there are 10 other people who tried X who have hit really serious problems (often fatal).

Given the nature of our business and product we see an awful lot of ELN projects across a wide variety of businesses, disciplines, and vendors. What we’re seeing in terms of best practice is at times completely contrary to what you’d think listening to conference talks, reading magazine articles etc. Of course, there’s no reason to suggest we’re right and everyone else is wrong, but on the other hand there’s a huge gap and that’s a worry.

So my presentation was an attempt to draw attention to this and propose some solutions:

  • Be very careful about the use of the “ELN” word, as it’s too ambiguous. Ideally, stop using it entirely. It is especially useful to get vendors to describe their offerings without using the term “ELN” – then you find what their real focus is.
  • Keep the ELN project as simple as possible. I mentioned some of the frameworks we use for this – The Triangle, Broad Vs Deep, etc.
  • Blog – read blogs, and join in yourselves.

You can download a copy of the presentation here here. I had some interesting chats with people afterwards – I’ll try to expand on some of these points in future posts.

As an aside, I’ve nearly given up on SlideShare – the Keynote conversion process doesn’t seem to be working well.

Update: Rich Apodaca over on Depth-First makes some contributions here.

 Posted by Simon Coles at 9:46 am

My workshop at IQPC Brussels yesterday

 Architecture, ELN Design, Project Management, Recent Conferences  No Responses »
Sep 292009
 

Jo and I gave a workshop on “ELNs in Biology” which people seem to enjoy. My thanks to the attendees who not only listened to what we had to say but contributed their own expertise and experience too which greatly enriched the experience for all involved.

We didn’t know what the attendees were going to want to cover so I must confess the presentations don’t read as well as they hopefully came across. However, I hope they will provoke some thoughts all the same.

My overall proposition is that Biology is a very different beast from Chemistry and what works in Chemistry – the products, approaches to the projects, rollout strategies, etc. all need to be reviewed in the light of the special challenges of Biology environments.

There were two main presentations I used. The first looked at the ELN story from Chemistry from Biology and some of the differences between the two. You can download it here.

The second presentation looked at the Technology Adoption Lifecycle (TALC), which was first described by Geoffrey Moore in his book “Crossing the Chasm”. The TALC describes how people react to discontinuous/disruptive innovations and how you can help your innovation get adopted as easily and widely as possible. My contention is that Biology userbases are sufficiently complex that you should use Chasm-crossing techniques to both develop and deploy your ELN. You can read the presentation here.

Interestingly there were a number of people in the workshop who had successfully deployed an ELN into Biology and they had used Chasm-crossing techniques to do so – not because they’d heard of the concept (they hadn’t) but because it was the most sensible approach.

I’ve also uploaded the presentations to SlideShare, but the conversion process is taking some time. Once they are up the SlideShare versions should have the transitions and builds etc. which might make for a better reading experience. They should be on my SlideShare page in due course.

There’s lots of other stuff that came up in discussion, which I will try to cover in later blog posts. For example:

  • What you see in conferences and publications in terms of case studies etc. isn’t representative of what’s really going on. There’s a lot of in-house development, a lot of use of Microsoft Office and other applications – but because there’s no vendor involved, they don’t get publicity because most publicity needs paying for, e.g. speaking slots, article placements etc. Sadly these are often the most successful deployments of ELN functionality – but it didn’t come from a vendor with “ELN” stamped on the box!
  • I don’t believe you can have one ELN for Chemistry and Biology – or even for all of Biology.
  • All of this is dependent on your definition of “Chemistry” and “Biology” – and this varies from company to company. In particular big Pharma seem to conduct a restricted set of activities on a very large scale (perhaps because all the really weird stuff is effectively outsourced to Biotechs) – which makes taking lessons from any company very difficult.
  • Of course, sales and marketing efforts by various vendors do nothing to clarify this already muddled picture!
 Posted by Simon Coles at 9:32 am
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