DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT | LABORATORY INFORMATICS GUIDE 2013


a track on status and version control. Time is wasted tracing document authors and co- ordinating reviews and revision prior to issue.’ She adds that security and confidentiality


are also issues. ‘Customers need to know that documents are in a secure repository and access is controlled, based on privileges,’ she observes. In addition, there is a need to keep a robust audit trail, especially if the users are doing contract research for another company. ‘Most businesses want as much as possible to


move away from paper-based systems towards electronic solutions for document and data management, whether this is for efficiency gains or to improve compliance levels,’ she says. ‘Any DMS must be able to grow with the customer and be flexible enough to incorporate changes as the customers requirements change.’


DOCUMENTS AND DATA Many laboratory documents are also generated by the experiments themselves and this is where the boundaries begin to blur between documents and data. Chris Malloy, VP of corporate development at IDBS, explains that electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) are increasingly becoming the centre of


organisation’s informative strategy. ‘The role of the ELN has changed


dramatically. It now forms a hub. Our E-Workbook was the first to allow integration of external literature sources – from Elsevier and Thomson Reuters – and has now evolved to become an enterprise information platform,’ he says. ‘The document was the old container of information, but organisations are now looking at new ways of bringing together information from across the organisation.’ He reports that contract


research organisations that IDBS speaks to estimate spending around 25 per cent of their time generating reports. He believes that online, real-time reporting of R&D data with the ability to drill down with context provides more insight than traditional report documents. ‘If you’re sharing your science by document,


possible to move away from paper-based systems towards


electronic solutions for document and


data management’ Kate Darley


‘Most businesses want as much as


ability to store data with context and metadata has improved. Often experiments are being rerun not because they were wrong, but either because someone didn’t know it was run or because insufficient data was gathered the first time. In a time when we are striving for efficiencies, that is unforgivable.’ He believes that in some circumstances data could replace traditional documents. ‘I think it would be possible to publish lab notebooks rather than papers,’ he predicts. ‘We’ve already enabled publication of chemical structures into ChemSpider [a free chemical structure database from the Royal Society of Chemistry]. Documents are containers of somebody


else’s choice. More and more people want to customise data their own way.’


someone has to interpret it. There has always been an issue of what to write down and what to store and save,’ he explains. ‘If you go back 15 years to the early days of drug screening, data was stored as hit or miss – just binary. The


SECURITY In any discussion about sharing information – whether it is documents or data – two current buzzwords tend to crop up pretty quickly. Those buzzwords are mobility and the cloud. ➤


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