Lab Notebook Digitization

I've got a few posts planned about our Lab Notebook Digitization project.  We recently had to change our lab notebook archiving process.  We had been using a vendor (Carmel Business Systems - CBS) in San Diego, but when we closed our site there, it didn't make much sense to ship them across the country to be digitized and then have to ship them back.  It is too bad as CBS had done a great job.  They worked with us about about 6 years ago to build a digitization process using digital cameras which was much faster and cheaper than the old system of microfilm with scanners filling in for color lab notebook pages.

When reviewing the options, we looked at the state of the state for outsourcing digitization which six years later is much more mature.  Since we are digitizing our archived notebooks (ones archived with the older process), we were also looking for a less expensive option for several thousand lab notebooks.  We were a bit surprised at the cost of outsourcing digitization in our local market.  So surprised in fact (and due to the rather budget-breaking costs), that we looked into more of a DIY approach.

I was very happy to see how far the DIY digitization marketplace has come.  There are now at least two very good digitization vendors in the marketplace with included software for digitizing books (thank you Google Books and Microsoft and Internet Archive and the EU for creating this market).  I looked at several vendors, but the best ones for my needs were Kirtas and Atiz.  As much as I love the concept of an army of digitization robots stoking my dreams of megalomaniacal world domination, I realized the Kirtas digitization robot would not be suitable for lab notebooks which have foldouts, pockets for photographs and all sorts of other creative ways of communicating intellectual property that are impossible for the Kirtas robot to deal with.  Kirtas does have manual stations, but I wasn't as impressed with those compared to the BookDrive series from Atiz.  The LED lights, V cradle and the V glass for holding the books down were features I really liked along with the price.  Price was definitely a selling feature.

Based on the cost of a fully loaded BookdrivePro with excellent 22 megapixel cameras and the staff required to run it, we estimated our digitization costs per notebook to be about 3-4X cheaper than the best estimate we could get from an external digitization vendor.  We expect to increase that ratio to about 5-6X  after Atiz improves their software based on some suggestions a colleague of mine (James McIninch) made.

Google's Birthday Wishes

I was quite pleased today to see Google's Birthday wishes to me.  It's impressive how pervasive personalization can be and how nice it is (though still a bit creepy - I've taken to turning off the monitor now when I'm talking about something sensitive --  just kidding :)

Play to Work!

If you start noticing this in your colleagues:  "... rigid, humorless, inflexible and closed to trying out new options.", then please get them into playschool ASAP.

From http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/let-the-children-play-some-more/:

"The differences in playfulness when adulthood arrives (I have followed more than 6,000 detailed play histories) validates the importance of lifelong play. Play-deprived adults are often rigid, humorless, inflexible and closed to trying out new options. Playfulness enhances the capacity to innovate, adapt and master changing circumstances. It is not just an escape. It can help us integrate and reconcile difficult or contradictory circumstances. And, often, it can show us a way out of our problems. There are numerous examples of difficult, deadlocked negotiations that were broken open by a joke or humorous incident. Many people have had the experience of coming back from vacation brimming with new ideas for work. The benefits of play come not from “rest” for the brain, as if play is just a time-out from life. Play is an active process that reshapes our rigid views of the world."

Fortunately for me since I'm a bit of a workaholic is that for me work is play.  It's not just an adventure - it's a job!

Licensing terms: poison or fertilizer?

There are as many different licensing schemes as there are products, but they mainly come down to seat-based or concurrent licensing models. This may be an oversimplification, but please bear with me on this as it makes it easier to explain my point.

Seat-based licensing means that each person who uses a software product or service must have their own individual account for that product. Concurrent licensing means that multiple individuals can share access to a product or service. Site licensing is a common variation of concurrent licensing.

The applications that I deliver to my internal customers are not broadly used. The usage rates usually show a small percentage of core, heavy users of a product (e.g. near daily use), a larger percentage being moderate users (e.g. 1-10 times per month), and the majority of the users being very light users (e.g. 1-4 times per year). This is entirely natural and appropriate given the types of products we deliver, and I have no interest in trying to convert casual users to heavy users where it doesn't make business sense.

A seat-based license generally makes it difficult to support more than the small percentage of core users. It is difficult to justify the expense of a product for casual users. Also, seat-based licenses generally require more administration by my staff who generally have much more valuable things to than shift seats around and reset passwords.

A concurrent license makes it easier to advertise a product or service to a larger potential user base where we might be reluctant to do so for a seat-based licensed product. A larger user base, even a casual user base, makes it easier to defend a product or service during budget discussions. Often, concurrent licenses encourage the vendor to do a better job with usability (due to the expectation of larger numbers of casual users who will not benefit from extensive training), self-service administration and usage logging. The first two items mean my staff spends less time on administration and more on product evangelism. The last item is invaluable for resource management.

Now if you have a product that is truly so complex and onerous to use that you are only going to have a handful of experts using it, then by all means, use a seat-based license. Otherwise, think about whether you want your product or service to die on the vine or flourish.

Corporate havens of incompetence

How do you make a safe haven for incompetence? Make a rule, develop a process, or publish a guideline. I'm not saying that you should never propose processes or guidelines, but you should be very careful in why and how you do it. Organizations have a tendency to throw a rule or process at every mistake or problem that comes their way. This is absolutely the best way to protect you from incompetence either in management or your employees.

Training is the kiss of death

I was listening to Jason Kalenkanis and Leo Laporte on the podcast "This Week in Tech - Grand Theft Yahoo" which triggered this posting.

Designing your application or service to require training is the easiest way to kill it. <Sarcasm ON>The other idea I love to see is coming up with a new design that is functionally different from the way everyone else is doing it <Sarcasm OFF>. Running with the herd doesn't show off your mad design skills, but it does help people just get the job done.

AIM for Sales

In talking to Sales staff about our Alert Information Management (AIM) project, I've learned that Sales people in bioPharma are either on the road, in doctor's offices/hospitals or at home. It is basically a given that they shouldn't be using Blackberries or other mobile clients for reading news and information updates while driving for everyone's safety. It is also a given that they shouldn't be using wireless gadgets in hospitals due to potential interference issues and therefore patient safety. Therefore, staying up to date on new research regarding their drugs and disease areas is something Sales staff have to do at home. Of course, their management wants them out talking to doctors - not sitting at home catching up on the latest research even though bioPharmas all have staff devoted to delivering research updates to Sales staff.

It is public knowledge that I'm involved in a project using Newsgator's Enterprise Server (NGES) for our AIM project. It has a very nice concept of 'locations' for different delivery mechanisms. For example, we can collect news and alert streams of information from a variety of sources: RSS feeds, emails, website monitors, search alerts that all get converted to RSS for management and re-distribution. Re-distribution can be in a variety of flavors: RSS streams, aggregated RSS streams, website insertion as a portlet for RSS, email alerts, screensavers, ...

I was thinking that I really enjoy listening to podcasts in my car and catching up on news and learning from them which led to me thinking why don't we add a new 'location' for NGES such that RSS streams are converted to podcasts. Locations are RSS feed specific so a Salesperson could set up the 'podcast location' to only include the RSS feeds they need to follow in this manner. There are already several websites that provide RSS to podcast conversion such as YAKITome or Odiogo. With this, a Salesperson could stay up to date using the down time while driving by listening to these podcasts. All of this would be automated and not require any additional manual effort to deliver (i.e. no empire building by adding a group dedicated to reading the news or research reports).

Using the iPhone as the platform for this would provide high-quality mobile web access, an RSS reader, a phone and a podcast tool wrapped up in one device. One particular feature that I would love (and which is not possible with the Blackberry device I have to use) is the easy switch between listening to a podcast, taking a call and then going back to the podcast. This is key - because fumbling with multiple devices in a car is not a great idea.

Of course, it's obviously easy enough using the available 'RSS to podcast' tools to bolt onto the back end of our RSS management system. Either way, it's just another example of the flexibility of RSS for AIM.