BioInformatics
The Oyster, the Grain of Sand, and the Pearl
By Bob Beliveau. Adverse conditions can sometimes produce remarkable results. Take the Oyster for example. When a grain of sand gets into its shell, it secretes a shell like substance (nacre) to coat the intruder. Over time, this process results in the formation of a Pearl, one of the World’s most treasured jewels. The same […]
Your Lab Doesn’t Need a LIMS
By Bob Beliveau. Many labs begin operations by capturing data in spreadsheets. Excel is ubiquitous and versatile, and the ability to add new columns to capture unforeseen data is a plus. Furthermore, instrument vendors provide spreadsheet export capabilities that make Excel data exchanges natural. As data volume grows and the lab processes mature, it becomes […]
Five Signs you are Mismanaging your Data
By Bob Beliveau. If you are in the Life Sciences industry, your data is your product. And your ability to find, share, and make decisions based on data is the key to your productivity. But we continue to see telltale signs that scientific data is being mismanaged. Here are a few things we look for […]
Pony Up – We Need Your Best People
By Bob Beliveau. In a former position, I used to lead an IT group. One of my duties was to meet with “the business” and discuss potential IT projects. A key message during these discussions was the need to devote resources to the project if it was going to be successful. We’d ask the business […]
Getting your Automation Projects off the Ground – Just do it!
By Bob Beliveau. At BioIT Solutions, one of our core principles is to learn from experience. Rather than initially building a large, comprehensive system, we counsel our customers to carve out a modest set of capabilities and get the system operational quickly. Once the system is in production, we often find that our pre-implementation concepts […]
IT – It’s a People Business
By Bob Beliveau. It’s not easy building and launching successful IT systems. You must have a firm grasp of technology. You must understand a customer’s business well enough to know where a system can add value. But you must also understand the people in an organization and how the project should be rolled out and […]
Clinical Diagnostics: An Internet Business?
By Mike Fannon. Personalized medicine promises to deliver treatments tailored to an individual and their specific disease characteristics. The approach represents a big leap in the practice of medicine and can result in more effective and lower cost prevention and treatment. A prerequisite to achieving the aspirations of personalized medicine is a new class of […]
Don’t Drive Your Process with Email
By Bob Beliveau. I’m going to level with you. I’m not a big fan of driving processes with Email. Oh sure, Email does have its place. When I order a new gadget on Amazon, I like to get that Email confirmation. And it’s cool to track your order via FedEx as it makes its way […]
It’s the Data, Dummy …
By Bob Beliveau. Decades ago, when I entered the industry, I joined a department called Data Systems. Many of my wet-behind-the-ears colleagues worked at other companies in their Management Information Systems (MIS) departments. We learned how to make the big iron mainframes crunch numbers and deliver reports to the line units. Sometime later, (the 1990s […]