The well traveled Wendy Warr offered to provide a review of some of the talks she attended at the 
August 31st, 2010
Agile and Efficient ELN Implementation
Mike Elliott’s most recent article in Scientific Computing provides an excellent overview of agile development, the software roll-out strategy that is becoming a de facto industry practice. Mike correctly concludes that iterative, time-based methodologies like agile are essential to help organizations manage risk, demonstrate success, and clear users’ resistance barriers. But just using agile won’t guarantee success: visionary management and a solid implementation strategy must be in place to avoid ad hoc, unproductive execution.
The biggest impact on an agile roll-out comes from two things: identifying the right stakeholders and the right sequence of iterative steps (or “sprints,” to use the agile vocabulary).
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August 27th, 2010
ELNs in Regulated Environments
We had a lot of questions during Millennium’s C&EN webinar about the use of ELNs in regulated environments. This question is even more relevant given the release this week of Symyx Notebook 6.5, which offers improvements specifically for chemical process development and scale up. I asked Michael Weaver, principal with The Weaver Group, a consultancy specializing in workflow integration in the QA and regulatory and process analytical areas, to comment on the specific challenges of using an ELN in regulated environments. He’ll be offering further insights in future entries in the coming weeks.
In physics, scientists often refer to a “theory of everything” that seeks to combine the seemingly different laws of the large scale of general relativity and the minute scale of quantum mechanics. Similarly, IT professionals in pharma dream of being able to unify the seemingly conflicting requirements of their R&D divisions and manufacturing areas under the umbrella of a single informatics solution.
Will this ever be possible? With the help of ELN software vendors, I think so.
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August 26th, 2010
ELN Scales Up: A Solution for Process Scientists
Dennis Curran, director of notebook products, describes the importance of the 6.5 version of Symyx Notebook by Accelrys. With its emphasis on support for process chemistry and use in regulated environments, the latest release of the ELN fittingly spans many of the sectors touched by the combined Symyx/Accelrys. Read on to learn why Dennis calls this a “very exciting time to be part of the notebook product team at Accelrys.”
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August 23rd, 2010
Mine’s Bigger Than Yours?: Counting Database Content
Counting up the compounds in a database should be as easy as, well, 1, 2, 3… But a recent thread on the Chemical Information Sources Discussion List (login required) pointed out that what counts is how (and what) vendors count.
I asked Carmen Nitsche, vice president, content, to summarize the confusion and explain how Symyx counts compounds for its premiere sourcing databases: the Available Chemicals Directory (ACD) and the Screening Compounds Directory (SCD).
The discussion on CHMINF is far from the first time that scientists have complained about vendors providing apparently misleading database counts. That’s because of the perception in the database market that size matters. If you’re selling a database, it looks good to boast that you have more compounds or reactions or suppliers than everyone else. So it shouldn’t be surprising that vendors will jockey for position.
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