Information: Laboratory informatics tools


Building a Smart Laboratory 2018


Configuration versus customisation


The difference between customisation and configuration is very simply the difference between writing additional code and setting (configuring) in-built parameters in order to achieve some desired functionality. Customisation is generally considered a poor choice as it increases costs, complexity, and risk, and makes it more difficult and more expensive to upgrade software in the future. In a regulated environment, custom code will require extra validation steps. It may often be a symptom of bigger problems, including a mismatch with a company’s requirements or a lack of project controls during implementation. Most laboratory informatics systems are designed to be configurable, and a major activity during implementation is to undertake the entire required configuration to meet functional requirements. Once configured, system upgrades will automatically carry through existing configuration.


An ELN can serve the organisation


in three ways: it can take advantage of the capabilities of IT to improve the ability to acquire, manipulate, share and store data (productivity); it can facilitate communication and sharing in real-time across multi-disciplinary and multi-site teams (collaboration); it can provide a scientific knowledge repository that can be easily accessed to recover records of the laboratory’s work (content/knowledge management). Te way in which laboratory notebooks


are used is largely dictated by the United States’ patent system which, unlike the rest of the world, is based on ‘first to invent’. Te need to be able to demonstrate who really was first to invent requires the laboratory notebook to be an authentic and trustworthy record that describes the concept and its reduction to practice, and for it to be signed by the author and corroborated by an impartial witness. Tere are two factors why the migration away from paper lab notebooks has taken so long: the reluctance


An ELN system (like the bound laboratory notebook) has several roles:


A place to do science – a working environment;


A place to write up the experimental work; A record of the work; and A long-term preservation mechanism.


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The wide range of commercial systems on the marketplace has become increasingly sophisticated over the years


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of lawyers and patent attorneys to gamble on the legal acceptance of electronic records in patent interferences and patent litigation without any case law; and the lack of confidence in our ability to preserve electronic records over several decades. One of the challenges to a successful


ELN implementation is identifying exactly what role the ELN will play. Te term ‘electronic laboratory notebook’ is inherently ambiguous. In most cases, the ELN is expected to do more than just replace the paper lab notebook. Te paper lab notebook is a simple authoring tool, and any electronic authoring tool capable of generating a compound document will serve as a replacement. For some companies this has proven to


be the case. Te combination of Microsoſt Office, SharePoint services and a means of preserving documents (e.g. in PDF – portable document format) has proven to be an adequate replacement for paper. But if more functionality than this is needed – for example, integrating various chemistry or biology-centric functions, or other discipline-specific tools – then we are really


talking about an electronic laboratory rather than an electronic laboratory notebook.


Chapter summary


Te four major laboratory informatics systems serve different basic functional requirements, but convergence and increasingly sophisticated technologies are creating a good deal of overlap between the systems. So when it comes to choosing the right


solution, it’s far better to start by defining an objective or describing the problem to be solved, rather than placing the initial focus on a ‘solution’. Just deciding ‘we need an ELN’ or ‘we


need a LIMS’ should not be the starting point; it’s far better to think about the big picture, i.e. the end-to-end business process that embraces the role of the laboratory, the specific workflows, the communication and collaboration requirements, and the integration requirements. Once these requirements are defined,


then the task of finding a solution is more straightforward. n


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