LABORATORY INFORMATICS GUIDE 2015 | CHANGE MANAGEMENT


MANAGING CHANGE IN THE LABORATORY TO DELIVER MORE VALUE


Technical innovation is inescapable and, Peter Boogaard argues, will force us to re-think our laboratory processes to increase their value to the enterprise


I


n our scientific software community, there is a fundamental mismatch between what we can achieve from a


technology perspective (nice to have) and what we should do from an overall business perspective (must have). During the past decade, major new technologies and software capabilities have been introduced in both consumer and professional markets. Some of these may increase efficiency and quality, or may result in a decrease in operational costs. In many cases however, these new


developments are a prompt to rethink, urgently and fundamentally, whether and how we should apply them in our day-to-day operations. Many research, manufacturing, and regulatory procedures have been unchanged for years and need to be revisited urgently. Integrating legacy,


Potential benefits of new technologies Business


IT


Ability to consolidate best practices and re-engineer legacy processes


Enable cross departmental integration


Increase integrity and traceability throughout entire lifecycle


Easy access to dashboard and scorecards


Enable more accurate KPIs


Apply new financial models across enterprise (Capex vs Opex)


Enable more insights to manage risks across external partners


Reduction of complexity to support single point of truth access across platforms


Support new mobility platforms


Enable consistent data archive processes


Enable consistent corporate security and data access


Apply data standards to integrate cross-departmental systems


Expand value of unstructured data into structured components


silo-based departments is becoming a priority on the agenda in many boardrooms. But simplification is easier said than done.


Underlying processes are becoming more complex every day. Where to start? How to prioritise? Which key


performance indicators to define? What lessons can be learned from other industries? Do we know the risks involved when embarking on change management? There seems almost to be an issue of fatigue


with respect to corporate change. In our personal lives, we experience a significantly lower barrier to adopting new technologies and processes. We easily accept new ways of working, for example when we transfer personal monies through our electronic banking application. We are not afraid of using the cloud


End user


Enable self-documenting processes


Reduce transcription errors to zero


Support live data to support collaborative workspaces


Automatically tag metadata at the source


Re-use prior knowledge more easily


Enforce consistent workflows across scientific systems


Ability to automate witnessing Significantly improve searching 4 | www.scientific-computing.com/lig2015


We are geniuses at finding excuses not to use the same technologies


and processes when we perform our daily work in corporate life


In point of fact, it took more than 25 years


before paperless operations have become accepted and adopted successfully. Yet fewer than 10 years have elapsed since consumer GPS technology was introduced, while Google Earth was introduced just five years ago. Why are there significant differences in the adoption curves for these new technologies? And more importantly, what can we learn and apply from our personal to our professional life? Let’s take a step back and answer some of the basics first – to understand what we want to


when we check in for our next flight. We submit millions of messages on social media and chat services, without any great anxiety. Yet we are geniuses at finding excuses not to


use the same technologies and processes when we perform our daily work in corporate life. Even when the gains from these new ways of working might be significant, the tendency is to pass them by on the other side. In this article, I want to challenge the reader on how we can identify areas where these new technologies and processes can improve our operations from both the scientific and the economic perspective.


WE ALWAYS HAVE DONE IT THIS WAY… The discussion about paper versus paperless is almost as old as commercial computers. In 1975, just after the introduction of the first personal computer Scelbi (SCientific, ELectronic and BIological), Business Week was predicting that computer records would soon completely replace paper.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36