Animal Stories: Justifying LIMS is a vicious and cruel task
Those who best articulate benefits stand a chance, even in thin-budget times
Randy C. Hice 

Animal stories make my day in the Denver Post each morning. The latest involved a lady walking to her car in Evergreen who was attacked in a parking lot by an elk. Now, elk are like deer on anabolic steroids, and there’s no joy in getting on their bad side. The lady was unhurt, but likely packing heat the next time she goes to Wal-Mart. Just today, another elk jumped into an above-ground swimming pool and kicked it to pieces before exiting wet and properly chlorinated.

How about a guy who was sitting in his Aspen house a week or so back, and a bear came in to browse through his kitchen? This is Darwin’s Law in action, as the gentleman had left a screen door open. Not something you want to do with bears that have lost any fear of humans and consider open houses to be dine-in restaurants. The bear attacked the man, albeit half-heartedly, and left him with only an injured arm.

One of my macabre stories from the neighborhood happened not long ago when I was driving out of my subdivision, and saw a huge hawk flying 10 feet over my car carrying a housecat. The next day, I saw all sorts of “lost cat” signs up on the street posts, creating a moral dilemma for me: do I let the family think their cat found a better deal and just walked off, or do I go to their front door and tell them the good news/bad news angle?

 Good news – I know where your cat went
 Bad news – How do you feel about in-flight dining?

More bird news: I have a group of four owls that sit on my fence quite often. There is a mathematical relationship between their presence and the decline of the local rabbit population. While people think of owls as cute, fluffy, wise birds, they are in fact ruthless killers with stealth technology (their feathers are noiseless in flight, in addition to their astonishing vision), and they rip apart more animals in the neighborhood than coyotes and hawks combined.

So, today’s theme addresses the unexpected eventualities that seem to plague lab informatics projects before they even begin.

Project delays
Projects can be severely delayed or cancelled outright for dozens of reasons. The most obvious in this economy is, well, the economy. But is it? It’s one thing if a company has taken a beating and has no discretionary project budget. However, more often than not, there are funds available. The most articulate champions of pet projects are the ones who successfully compete for scarce budgets. The prime example that occurs with great monotony is the all-consuming enterprise resource planning (ERP) project. I recall visiting a site whereby a systems, applications and products project was estimated to delay a LIMS project for more than a year. The consulting company had a horde of busy beavers working on the project to the tune of about $2,000,000 a month. This monthly burn was greater than the entire budget of the LIMS project.

I also recall visiting a site during the 9/11 terrorist attack. Learning that the airports would be shut down indefinitely, I “forgot” to return my rental car to a Tennessee airport, instead driving past the airport, and continuing on for another 800 miles to my home in Florida. When I checked the car in half a country away from where it was due, the AVIS clerk just handed me my receipt and wished me a nice day. Well, here we are eight years past 9/11/01 and the LIMS project has yet to begin. The reason for the delay: ERP brain drain and lack of proper justification.

While ERP projects can usurp informatics projects on the sheer strength of their multi-faceted penetration into the DNA of a company, other much smaller projects often win out as well. Why is that? Look no further than articulation of cost and benefits.

Say a lab manager wants a half-million dollars for more instruments. He throws up a PowerPoint with a line graph indicating increase in tests-per-hour with the addition of the new instruments. Now, the lab informatics project lead comes in, throws up a slide, and says that a LIMS will increase productivity but, alas, has no line graph. Management asks, “How do you know the LIMS will make us more productive?”

Don’t underestimate the prevalence of these debates out in the world. So many informatics project champions rush into budget battles armed with the corporate equivalent of rubber bands and paper clips, while their competition has longbows and boiling oil. LIMS are not easy to justify, but they are justifiable.

There are visible costs and invisible costs, just as there are hard and soft benefits. The crevasse that many companies fall into is not knowing the difference. Visible costs are the checks that must be signed for LIMS licenses, configuration services and annuity support. Where are the invisible costs? If a company elects to delay a LIMS, and let’s assume the company is comfortably profitable, what’s the harm? Extended data review time, delay of product release, exposure and response to regulatory audits, continued reduction of data quality and searching for lost samples.

Avoidance of these invisible costs falls under the heading of “soft benefits,” the bane of accountants everywhere. But soft benefits are real, and can even be converted to hard benefits, and thus can be assigned visible costs. But, you can imagine the strain of trying to quantify things like “time consumed when the FDA is in house,” or “time spent by a Masters-degreed chemist checking grade school math?”

More elusive are things like “response time to FDA 483 citations,” or the ever-popular, “effect on stock price of a Consent Decree.” Yes, indeed. Put that on a PowerPoint slide and your presentation to the budget committee will be talked about long after you have been fired.

So, the moral of the story is that those who best articulate project benefits stand a chance of getting project budget, even in times when budgets are thin. The mistake made by the project champions in too many cases is telling hard-core numbers wonks that they “feel good about the benefits of a LIMS.” Don’t take a knife to a gunfight, as they say. If you do, your parched bones will decorate the landscape of the company for years to come, and it will be your face on the poster parked beneath the missing cat.

Randy Hice is Director, Strategic Consulting at STARLIMS. He may be reached at editor@ScientificComputing.com.