Conferences for Laboratory Informatics Services Consultants

This is yet another unserved area of the conference arena. I didn’t include it in yesterday’s posting because I have enough to say about it that it deserves its own post.

Conferences I Attend
Along with laboratory informatics conferences, I average a conference per year of consulting conferences. Yes, I mean that I attend conferences that entirely have to do with being a better consultant. Because I own my business, I tend to attend conferences that combine sessions on providing better services AND in better running my business.

Our industry spends its time talking and learning about new tools new tools, but despite all these new tools, we continue to have too many failed projects. One of the many reasons for project failure is that the services provided to it failed in some manner, and this is a significant reason, as well. Yet those people that provide the services are trained just on tools, not on how to provide services and to be good consultants.

Bad Attitudes
There’s an attitude in our industry that all you have to do to create a consultant is take someone that knows a particular tool or train a junior person on that tool, and send them to a customer and charge the customer for them. While too few services providers do more than that, customers are almost as much to blame because they continue to put up with this. I say that customers are “almost” as much to blame because I do think they should be more forceful about changing the situation if they want it changed, but here’s issue: the people providing the services are supposed to be the experts. We’re supposed to be able to figure out how to do this so that customers don’t have to ask us to do it or complain that we’re NOT doing it.

Someone is sure to write to me to lecture me on how far we’ve come with regard to the quality of services we provide, as an industry. I agree that we’ve improved. Fifteen years ago when I started my business, I’d say that the services the industry provided were mostly horrible compared to consulting services not specifically aimed toward our industry. Our industry has improved quite a lot from that. But improvement isn’t good-enough. These days, customers are expecting professional services from us all and still paying a lot of money for them. Some customers have decided that they’d rather pay discount prices, instead, but many of them are still paying high prices and not necessarily getting services that meet those prices.

Pretend a customer was buying a LIMS or an ELN: if it were missing features, wouldn’t a customer insist that those features be added? Yes, they would. They’d probably push for it at every user group meeting they attended. But when the consultants they’re send aren’t as good as advertised, they don’t tend to push for change in the same aggressive manner as they would if it were a product problem.

Ways to Change This
Consultants should be pushed by their companies to attend events that increase their professionalism and ability to do the best they can do to provide their services which should be paid-for by their employer AND they’d attend on company time.

For example, if they’re a business analyst, they should attend IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis( (http://www.theiiba.org/am/) meetings and conferences. If they are a project manager, they should get involved with PMI (Project Management Institute) (http://www.pmi.org/). There are groups around for programmers and even some of the tools that we use. Some regions have meetings that might be of interest and I want to specifically mention Boston’s IEEE CNET (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Consultant’s Network) (http://www.ieee.org/index.html   http://www.boston-consult.org/), which is probably not quite the right organization for most of us to join, but does have relevant topics on things like: providing better services; technical writing tips.

Why We Might Need To Create Something Just for Us
On the other hand, meetings held by these types of organizations favor those people who don't travel for a living. Many people in our industry travel heavily-enough that they might not be able to attend many or any of these events. And when they AREN"T travelling, they're probably just so glad to stay home and see their family that they'd have to be dragged out by their big toe. But still, we need to make more of an effort, here.

As an industry, it wouldn’t hurt us to create an event just for this huge group of people. In an era where integration is a big issue, one would think that getting people together to discuss the data and processes being integrated, as a whole, could be a good idea. That, along with discussing ethical and professional behavior and other relevant consulting issues, and we’d have plenty to talk about together. But since our industry has put such a focus on learning the software products, many services groups do not see value in learning better consulting habits nor do they have much incentive to do so.

Customers are Part of It
Lots of times, customers don’t feel that they have a choice and don’t know what they’d do if they didn’t accept whatever resource was sent their way. But when customers can find alternatives, unless they become somewhat more ruthless about insisting on professional and ethical behavior from all those who provide their services, there won’t be any change.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/