Presentation: Survey of the ELN Landscape

By Simon Coles | Published: January 27, 2010

Here’s my presentation on “Surveying the ELN Landscape” from the SMI ELN Conference in London today. Bullet points:

  • Business drivers
  • Comparing the different sectors and disciplines
  • Build or buy?
  • An overview of the solution space
  • Patterns of success

There’s a few concepts in here which deserve their own posts (presentations are so useful for stimulating the creative juices!) which hopefully I can do over the coming weeks.

2010 01 27 Surveying the ELN Landscape

View more presentations from Simon Coles.
Posted in ELN Design, Industry, Project Management, Recent Conferences | 1 Comment

“Chairman’s Opening Remarks” from SMI ELN Conference in London

By Simon Coles | Published: January 27, 2010

I’m chairing the first day of the SMI ELN Conference in London today. Which truth be told isn’t something I enjoy but hopefully I can add something.

Anyway, you have to give a 10 minute presentation talking about wider industry issues and I thought it was appropriate to draw people’s attention to what’s happening in the consumer space and how it might bring us towards the original vision of an ELN.

I’ll blog more on this tomorrow (after the Apple announcement today!) but for the moment here’s the presentation….

2010 01 27 Chairman Opening Remarks
View more presentations from Simon Coles.
Posted in Architecture, ELN Design, Industry, Recent Conferences | 1 Comment

The Toaster Parable

By Simon Coles | Published: January 20, 2010

We give a number of workshops around the world which have fancy titles but in the end they are all about “How not to screw up an ELN project”. In this we use the example of the humble toaster to bring home the fact that an ELN project team are specifying something for the people who didn’t volunteer to be members of the ELN project team! If you want your project to be a success you need to remember that your target audience don’t really care as much as you do which means you need to adjust your expectations about how much brainspace they’re prepared to give any “ELN”-like tool you provide.

So many teams have over-specified what they want (because they are ELN geeks!), spent ages deciding to buy expensive software, and rushed out to their userbase with the result of years of effort – to be greeted with total apathy. Everyone loses in this case.

This is what I call the Toaster Problem – I just want toast. My wife on the other hand wants a work of art – which can produce anything you want as long as you have a degree in cooking. My wife is on the Toaster Buying Committee, and I am a humble Dad trying to get to work on time – huge difference in outlook, and sadly it’s the ones who aren’t on the committee who matter most for the ultimate business success of the project.

Anyway, I stumbled on the Parable of the Toaster which is tangentially related but will be amusing for those of us who have experienced the different mindsets which can populate our profession. Those lovely consultants…

Posted in Project Management | Leave a comment

Wow, an understandable NDA

By Simon Coles | Published: December 25, 2009

I’m not sure I’ll ever see something like this cross my desk, but this is a refreshing change from the standard densely-worded missive that I often get asked to sign: A non disclosure agreement people can understand on leanstartups.com.

(as an aside, we generally prefer to sign mutual NDAs rather that one-sided ones – just as a matter of mutual respect – we’re both bringing something of value to the conversation, surely?)

Posted in Legal | Tagged | Leave a comment

Brief thoughts on the future of scientific UIs

By Simon Coles | Published: December 22, 2009

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 in Architecture, ELN Design, Industry | Leave a comment
This website uses a Hackadelic PlugIn, Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.4.
Real Time Web Analytics