Social Enable your Laboratory

Social Enable your software to add a new level of productivity to laboratory, medical, scientific & business applications.

For analytical, qc, healthcare and scientific research labs, the purpose of these labs is to produce actionable information for those who are serviced by those laboratories. To do that, the laboratory needs enterprise class information management systems such as LIMS, LIS, ELN, SDMS, CDMS, LES and a slew of other acronyms. If you are uncertain as to what all these stand for, you can find a good article (note 1) that describes them. In addition to these systems, the lab needs people. When you look at the laboratory, it is dependent on people and the knowledge and skills that they bring to take data from analytical tests and research experiments and compile that into meaningful information that must be managed and disseminated to the wide array of laboratory stakeholders. In summary, the lab depends on Information Technology and the social interaction of the professionals within the lab ecosystem to deliver quality driven, actionable and cost effective results.

Currently, most of the lab systems and people are simply silos of information within an organization and collaboration and sharing is done with external Enterprise Social Network apps(note 2) such as Slack or Skype Enterprise or MS-Sharepoint or a custom lab portal and a variety of integration middleware and office apps. These are all fine components by themselves but there needs to be a better and more integrated way of facilitating collaboration and sharing of information in a secure and appropriate manner such that all laboratory stakeholders are better served. The answer to this is to Social Enable your applications with a common framework or platform that each of the applications is integrated with.

Why do I want to Social Enable my enterprise apps?

1. Enterprise apps is where the work of the enterprise gets done. Work is done by groups of people using those apps and social enabled functionality increases the speed of delivery, reduces mistakes through communications of standards and improves overall quality and customer service through better communications and collaboration between all stakeholders.
2. Social enabled enterprise apps should provide secure, traceable, rule driven communications and collaboration across all stakeholders (clients, partners, vendors, employees, contractors and potential clients).
3. Bring the social network to the stakeholders, do not send the stakeholders to the social network (they simply won't go). This makes communications and collaboration a seamless part of the business workflow as the stakeholder use the enterprise app.
4. Social enabled apps allow for an organic and natural workflow that is driven by the stakeholders rather than a disinterested top down (I know what is best for you) approach. It empowers the stakeholders to innovate the processes and to share those innovations within a controlled but open ecosystem of applications, workflows and other business deliverables.
5. Finally, one of the more important aspects of the social enabled app is to provide a platform for communications from the top of the enterprise. It allows for leadership to lead and to communicate within the integrated business workflow. This can have it's pluses and minuses but it is the enterprise and its leadership that will determine how well this works. Social tools are powerful and can be used for good or bad. This is what distinguishes organizations.

Great, sounds good but what does it mean and how do you do it?

Let's start with what it means to Social Enable your apps. We all know what a social network is. There are plenty of examples starting with Facebook and Linkedin but all of those are essentially personal in nature and are not geared for use within an enterprise. So what are the characteristics of a social network for the enterprise? Let's start with a basic feature set that is a must:

1. Must be secure and compliant (HIPAA, GDPR, CANSPAM, SOX, etc.)
2. Must provide Social & Single Sign-on across all enterprise applications as a set of Identify and Access Management (IAM) functions
3. All social features must be integrated into the enterprise applications with an easy to implement API.
4. Must be cloud accessible (so all stakeholders can utilize and interact regardless of location). This includes stakeholders that are external to the company and may well be part of other organizations.

What are the feature elements of the social enabled application?

1. Social & Single Sign-on with IAM
2. User Profile Management
3. Contact Management
4. Messaging
5. Favorites
6. File Sharing & Management
7. Social Post Feeds
8. App Dashboard
9. Public Social Integrations

Each of these features can take many forms and scopes but for the purpose of this article, I leave it with your imagination as to your own scope and feature definition.

Hasn't all of this been tried before? What makes this different?

Absolutely, been there, done that and failed and succeeded and every point in between. You know what they say... there is nothing new under the sun. Social networks have existed since the beginning of man. It does not take technology to form a social network. Political parties are social networks, trade associations are social networks, cities are social networks and companies are social networks and that is the point. You are doing the social thing whether you admit it or not. The question is how do we harness cloud technologies to make social network add to the efficiency, quality, client satisfaction and bottom line for your organization.

So what's next? What am I supposed to do?

Well, to answer that, it depends on who you are, what you do and what resources are available to you and whether or not you think what I have written makes sense for your organization. If what I have written and cited makes sense to you, then you have a starting point. If what I have written is something of no interest or does not sound credible then there is no next step.

Summary:

In summary, the Social Enabled Enterprise Laboratory Platform brings the social network to all laboratory stakeholders in a fluid and seamless way within the regular workflow of the lab and it's interactions between each other. It does not send the users off to an external social network where they end up asking themselves..."now what do I do and why I am having to do this?". If the social enabled lab platform does not work naturally for the users, then it has failed. Think about why the spreadsheet has been so successful and enduring in labs.... It's because it comes natural to the users. When the social networking functions are built into the apps the lab uses, then the users will naturally gravitate to them because they are easy to use, convenient and simply work. If they have to make a conscious decision to go off to some site to communicate and collaborate, the efforts will fail through attrition. You know the saying... 'If the mountain will not come?to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go?to the?mountain'

Cited Reference Notes:

1. https://www.limswiki.org/index.php/Laboratory_informatics
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_social_networking