The current hot topic of discussion between my customers and me concerns LIMS as a “data graveyard.” In other words, it’s the place where data goes to die. This is not a new topic, but one that continues to rear its ugly head. Over the years, I’ve talked again and again about LIMS being great at collecting data but poor at getting it back out, again.

Some Reasons for This
When we build a LIMS product or implement it, we focus on work-flow and jobs people are doing to use the LIMS. We stress usability, a minimization of keystrokes, and how to cover the many functions going on.

What we tend to leave out are the areas that aren’t included in the LIMS work-flow. For example, the statisticians, managers, and others who need information from the LIMS aren’t usually part of the work-flow of the LIMS. We tend to ignore their needs until it’s too late to address them.

Another misperception is that only structured groups can have structured data. I sometimes hear less structured groups, such as R&D groups, state that they need their system to be entirely flexible so they can do “anything.” First of all, I agree that their needs are unique, and they should not be locked into processes that make their work more complicated. With that said, I will unequivocally state that every group must build some structure into their LIMS. Without some modest amount of structure, it’s a needlessly huge and painful effort to do all that reporting, trending, statistical analysis, and gathering of data to dump out to other systems. This task is something most companies do want and need to do, so this is a serious problem.

“Data Graveyard” Discussion: When It’s Negative
If this discussion takes place at the end of the project, as in, “Wow, we’ve built a data graveyard. We’ve got all this data we’re storing and no good way to get it back out, again,” then you’ve got a serious problem with your implementation. You can make it better by correcting this situation—fast. If you are in phase 1 of your project and this phase is small, address the problem NOW. The pain will be a great deal less than the nightmare you’ll have if you continue to postpone the inevitable. Bite the bullet and just do it, now.

“Date Graveyard” Discussion: When It’s Positive
A positive conversation to have regarding your project is, “Since we’re just starting our project, let’s make sure we don’t create a data graveyard. Let’s try to keep in mind that we’ll need this data for other things and try to build that in. We’ll keep our first phase small so we can correct problems we inadvertently build in. Additionally, we’ll audit our ability to get the data out at the end of the phase to verify that we did as good a job as we tried to do.” In fact, small audits along the way will help this effort, as I’m sure you already suspect.

Finally
Gathering data is easy. We spend almost all our time focusing on that aspect of building the systems. It seems difficult, sometimes, but still much easier than the issue of turning that data into information. Without careful planning, we end up with a lot of useless data and we can’t turn it into the useful information we actually need. And, the longer you wait to address this problem, the more painful and expensive it will be to correct.