Leaving a legacy
Robert Roe investigates the importance of upgrading
legacy laboratory informatics systems and the benefits this provides to scientists
O
rganisations choose to adopt informatics solutions in order to accelerate their capability for research, but once these tools
can no longer provide sufficient value they must be replaced. However, choosing which solution requires an understanding of the role of the laboratory and how it might change in the future. Tis is, in part, because there are a host of
varied solutions available both in terms of laboratory informatics management systems (LIMS) and electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN), and combined platforms that offer functionality of both systems. Tere are a wide variety of deployment
models and underlying technologies such as hosted or cloud based-soſtware packages, which further complicate purchasing decisions.
When is the right time for an upgrade? Ed Ingalls, Termo Fisher Scientific’s director of professional services for the Americas, explains the reasoning behind most users’ choice to upgrade their soſtware: ‘Typically the systems tend to be aged and the technology has passed them by – they are not satisfied with the system anymore whether or not it is supported by the vendor. Oſtentimes the customers themselves have neglected them and they just fall kind of dormant and
4 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
they are not getting enough value out of them.’ Maarten den Boer, Termo Fisher
Scientific’s director of professional services, EMEA, agrees: ‘We also see a lot of home- grown systems that need to be replaced,’ adding that these projects ‘will sometimes require external developers or proprietary languages that are no longer available for further soſtware development’. Managing and continually updating an
internally developed soſtware packages is an expensive and time consuming task. Soſtware development requires a company to support an IT infrastructure with sufficient expertise to maintain its soſtware. Most laboratories do not want to carry this burden. Trish Meek, director of product strategy at
Termo Fisher Scientific, states: ‘A lot of times when upgrading those internally developed systems we find that the resources are ready to be retired, they have leſt the company and they just cannot support them internally anymore.’
Customise vs configure Rather than creating in-house soſtware, many informatics vendors now offer tools to configure workflows without the addition of custom code. John Boother, managing director at
Autoscribe Informatics, says: ‘One of the strengths that we have is the flexibility of our soſtware, our ability to genuinely configure the soſtware – to meet individual customer’s requirements. What I mean by genuine configuration is we have developed a set of tools that allow us to develop workflows and screens for the system.’ Boother gives an extreme example of a
lottery management system that was created using the Matrix Gemini LIMS system ‘without writing a single line of code because
we can do it all with configuration tools.’ Laboratory informatics soſtware is
developed in order to support scientists to carry out laboratory operations. Traditionally this meant sample management and supporting testing and experimentation – making it easier to store and analyse data that has been created. However, as the role of the laboratory becomes more complex through new methods and more data and compute intensive technologies, upgrading a legacy system require an understanding how the role of the laboratory can change over time. ‘Te system can be continually or
periodically updated in terms of its user interface and its workflows and so on to match the needs of the user company. Te LIMS that we supply have got to be designed for change because laboratories change,’ says Boother. ‘I am not talking about the need to add different tests but something a bit more fundamental than that.’ Boother says that, increasingly, it is not
just the initial sample data that needs to be collected. A user may want to adjust the way the data from a certain test is stored, adding new data streams or adjusting existing parameters to allow better integration with other data sets. Te Matrix Gemini system is designed to allow easy reconfiguration to tailor data acquisition and management in addition to setting up new tests and experiments. Anthony Uzzo, Core Informatics co-
founder, explains the importance of introducing workflows into informatics soſtware: ‘Tis is the issue that has plagued many of the legacy LIMS and ELN products in the market. In order for them to be tailored to the unique needs of customers, they need to invest in a significant amount of custom code. Tat makes each installation of their product different from all of the rest
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