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Last updated: May 28, 2008
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The Future of Lab Data Management

Predicting the future is a lot like predicting the weather: it’s perfectly normal to be wrong 50 per cent of the time, mainly because anything can affect and therefore change the prediction at the last moment. Getting it right half the time is not just a science, but an art. The science/art of accurate prediction relies heavily on past trends as well as nimble assessment of how those trends drove changes in their own time and what those changes might be in the future.

National Instruments just published an interesting article on the future of data acquisition that focuses on data acquisition devices with, naturally, a bias toward their own products and how those products have both reflected and contributed to key trends (www.ni.com). As an active and long-term participant in the data acquisition marketplace, they have strong grounds for making accurate predictions. The article by Brian Betts, a data acquisition technical marketing group manager for National Instruments, foretells a future where device costs are reduced while the expanding use of USB 2.0 continues to drive the use of portable measurement activities. It also points out that “wireless is one of the most promising technologies for data acquisition”. There are many synergies between what Mr. Betts envisions and what can and most likely will happen in the LIMS arena.

Some costs will come down while others will go up. On the whole, we always seem to be paying more for things, and this doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon. The impact of related technology has always been a bonus for the LIMS industry as the Internet, HTML, XML as well as hardware improvements have made data management tasks much easier to perform in recent years. Portable devices have been around for quite some time in the form of PDAs, etc. Wireless is part and parcel with these trends. Of interest is how wireless technology is on the ascendant at the same time that web-deliverable LIMS are finally gaining market acceptance. The marriage of these technologies will help the management of laboratory data to become, essentially, location-independent from the actual lab itself.

As the drive to provide ever more functional and productive technology results in easier to use, (and generally) less expensive solutions, laboratories worldwide will be able to acquire, manage and report their data in ever more interesting ways. Despite the proliferation of spam and the continued (and sometimes successful) attacks on corporate firewalls, managing mission-critical data online can be performed essentially free from outside problems while significantly lowering operating costs.

Our prediction? Laboratories won’t be spending all that much less on web-deliverable LIMS since it wouldn’t benefit the LIMS vendor to cut their revenue streams. Rather, web-deliverable pay-as-you-go solutions make it much easier to manage the costs and puts those costs into a different category on the balance sheet (even though over time, the cost is higher than purchasing the software outright). Even so, the future of the LIMS industry will continue to migrate in this direction as organizations seek additional means to streamline expenses while maintaining productivity.