elnblog: Electronic Lab Notebooks

Interview with me about the Frost & Sullivan award

Embarrassingly, I have just realized I never did a blog post on our recent Frost & Sullivan award - the short version is yes, we’re dead chuffed.

I was interviewed by IQPC’s Pharma IQ Community about this - you can read the full interview on their site, but here’s the highlights…. the questions were pretty insightful and forced me to write down some stuff I don’t think I’ve written elsewhere (I’m not too good at writing stuff down unless I have to!).

The interview was conducted by Emma Cobbledick, Editor, The Pharma IQ Community Newsletter

E: Hi Simon, thanks for agreeing to talk to me today. It’d be great if you could let our readers know a little bit about Amphora’s history to start us off.

S: Amphora grew out of a consulting engagement with Eastman Kodak in 1996. Kodak identified some specific business issues which required a fully-electronic ELN to be used by their scientists, enterprise-wide (and at the time Kodak’s R&D was huge). The company I was working for at the time were engaged by Kodak and I was the project manager. Things grew from there - with Kodak’s encouragement we turned the project into a product which we sold to a few other larger companies, and then in 2003 we did a Management Buyout and released a new generation of products more suited to today’s users and technology platforms. Amphora is based in the US & UK, and we have customers all around the world.

E: You recently received the Frost & Sullivan Award for Market Penetration Leadership, presented each year to the company that has demonstrated excellence in capturing market share within their industry. What criteria were you assessed on?

S: You can read the award citation for the detail, but to summarise they were looking at how Amphora was executing in the market place: our products and their focus on customer needs, how we take products to market, and the outcome of that in terms of market share. It isn’t just about the current situation; they are also looking at how we’re positioned for the future.

E: And which of these in particular did the judges think Amphora really excelled at?

S: We seem to have hit on the right product set and sales approach which allow us to solve the Lab Notebook problem quickly and efficiently in a wide variety of organisations, for a price they can afford and delivered in a package they can deploy. Turns out that’s been one of the biggest problems for the ELN market as a whole and is one of the reasons why things are only now really beginning to take off. Interestingly, what we’ve found actually works is entirely different to what we all thought (myself included) back in the late 90’s.

E: What would you say was unique about Amphora products insofar as the customer is concerned?

S: From an end-user perspective, we try very hard to stay out of the user’s way. The science is the focus, and ideally the notebook should take a back seat allowing the scientist to work however they wish. We’ve got some users who don’t even realise they are using PatentSafe, which we’re very proud of.

From an IT and administration perspective, we tend to build very open, scalable systems and we’ve spent a lot of time engineering out some of the problems that cause issues in the field. We’ve got a lot of smaller customers and they don’t have the time or experience to tend complex IT systems, and once you’ve built something that can survive in that environment then that really helps the larger companies control their TCO too.

From a legal perspective we’ve spent an awful lot of time on our Patent Evidence Creation & Preservation system and we feel it is uniquely suited to the task. This is one area where a lot of diverse experience is hugely important, which we’re fortunate to have.

E: How do you view your position in the ELNs market and has the award changed that at all?

S: We’ve always been very focused on solving the “Replace the Bound Notebook” problem; sometimes that means our products will be used alone, sometimes in conjunction with other “ELN” systems from other suppliers. So I’d view our position as solving a particularly tricky part of the ELN problem space, and we are delighted to be able to work with other vendors where our customers need some discipline-specific functionality on the desktop.

I’m not sure the award has changed much in reality, although historically we haven’t spent a lot of time tooting our own horn - in a lot of early markets all you see is lots of loud marketing fluff, almost as a substitute for making sales. We’ve preferred to focus on figuring out how to solve the problem and making the sales, gaining experience all the time. What the award has done has drawn attention to that - I suspect people had trouble figuring out what we were about before, because we weren’t doing the normal marketing thing.

E: If you were to offer advice to a company considering getting involved in ELNs, what would be the first thing you’d tell them?

S: The first thing I’d do is stop using the phrase “ELN” to describe your project; the term is terribly ambiguous and means many different things to different people.

Before you get involved in products and vendors, take a clear look at what you are trying to do. Try to keep it as simple as possible; a major cause of ELN project failure is people get distracted by all the wonderful possibilities that you could do in eR&D nirvana and they end up with something that they can’t afford, or if they can afford it they can’t roll it out.

Most successful ELN projects are surprisingly simple and will build on that initial success over a number of years. “Conventional wisdom” about what “should” be in a “proper” ELN seems to be based on the wishes & dreams of a few pundits, rather than on business need. Unfortunately, project managers seldom get credit for solving the business problem in a quick & simple way!

John Trigg (of PhaseFour Informatics) and I have been doing a workshop on ELN Project Implementation for a number of years - I do it as a non-commercial hobby. There’s a number of concepts which have stood the test of time which really help people focus on what their problem is and how they can increase their capabilities with minimal risk and cost going forward.

E: Sounds like sensible advice, what’s the most interesting development that you know of, in terms of the ELN industry and ELN usage?

S: I think there is finally a consensus that you can’t get a single “ELN” system which will meet the needs of everyone in an organisation. Science is a huge field which is constantly changing and there’s no way a single product can intimately support each group of users. So we’re seeing many more “ELN Systems” being deployed (with great success) which comprise more than one product called an “ELN”, focused on different groups of users. Customers are seeing that this approach is cost effective and lower risk, and vendors are increasingly seeing this isn’t a zero sum game - indeed, they will suffer in the market if they don’t focus on their strength and work well with others.

E: And what do you think is the biggest obstacle on the road to a paperless lab today?

S: Complexity. This is a hard problem space and one that’s very prone to being over-engineered into an unjustifiable wish-list of functionality and organisational initiatives. Combine that with a healthy dose of marketing and an enthusiastic sales person, and you have a recipe for project failure. Discipline is the key to success in ELN projects.

Marketing

I’ve been accused of being somewhat passionate about what we do, which is something I’d probably admit to with the qualifier that I consider it to be a feature not a bug - why do something you don’t care about.

Competition is good, because it means the industry is growing and being successful, and that means more scientists will be released from the tyranny that is the Paper Lab Notebook, and as a nice bonus we’ll all make money (because we added value to the world). Very nice, good karma all round.

As long as the competition is genuinely competent. Unfortunately we’ve now got people arriving in the industry who are totally clueless and are punting some truly scary stuff from the perspective of someone who’s been implementing electronic records systems for patent purposes for over 10 years now. Real, fundamental, “if you implement this you are screwed” stuff - not even something that’s debatable. Basic mistakes. Fortunately they aren’t getting much traction in the market, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing a lot of damage.

In at least a couple of cases the people pushing the bull**** have a nice product which has lots of good uses but is completely misapplied to this problem (as they have admitted to me privately - lots of beer was involved and we had a very frank, friendly conversation). They’re just giving this a punt.

I know I am naive and idealistic and the real world isn’t that simple, but wouldn’t it be nice to think that we could all do what we’re good at and be honest with the world? Why do we have to as a matter of deliberate policy spin our message, manipulate our prospects etc.? Do we really think that helps anyone? - sure you get the money today but the customer is screwed in 10 years and it only takes a few people to wake up to the fact the whole industry is going to get hit hard. I guess this is the “Trough of disillusionment in the Gartner lifecyle.

To give you a specific example, I know of a case where an ELN vendor claimed that one customer was using their product in fully electronic mode (which they weren’t). The prospect’s lawyer happened to know the apparent reference well, and asked them - and found they were still very firmly paper for records purposes. So the entire project got canned and all the work and hopes of that project team were wasted, just because the vendor got greedy. Of course the sales guy moved on a few months later, so what did he care? The poor prospect managed to implement an ELN system a few years later by not calling it an ELN and sticking to paper.

I do wonder if our difference in approach is that we’re privately held with a time horizon of years to get our investment back in this industry, rather than being focused on this quarter. As I write this, I can think of a lot of public companies who arrived on the ELN scene with a great marketing-driven splash and rapidly folded, and the successful companies are the smaller, private ones who have focused on doing the right thing. I don’t think we’ve suffered from avoiding the traditional marketing approaches.

I’m sure that traditional sales and marketing has a place, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of it is actively damaging the industry. If there’s a solution, I’d love to hear it because it is driving me crazy hearing some of this nonsense and not being able to respond (because we just get “You would say that, you are a competitor”). There has to be some level of idiocy which is beyond just a difference of opinion between competitors and needs to be labeled toxic.

Hey ho. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest, you can go back to banging your head against a brick wall now….

Finding stuff internally Vs externally, and emergence

Andrew McAfee writes in a post about Online Emergence

“When I talk about Enterprise 2.0 with company management teams, industry groups, and executive education students I usually start by asking people to raise their hands if it’s easier for them to find what they want on their company’s Intranet than it is on the public Internet.  ”

Yup - and right now, for scientists using the paper notebook, the situation is even worse, because they can’t even search it. They’re back to 20th-century “browse the library books” - and to add salt the wounds, they probably spend more time creating these records than any of their non-scientist colleagues spend on similar tasks.

This is the PatentSafe sweet spot - it is a real rush to fix such a long-standing problem in 5 minutes :-).

But the really cool thing is that because experiments tend to have something of an in-built structure, we can start to stitch everything together without scientists having to change anything except stop using the Bound Notebook. Which is kind of freaky but once you get the hang of it opens up huge possibilities and becomes tremendously empowering for all involved. We can finally bridge the impedance mismatch between the inherent variation in scientific activity/approach (”Scientists” are often very individual, which is both a delight and a challenge - and I married one) and the need to generate a consistent knowledge base.