Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
across as a fully integrated system - rather they were a patchwork of
individual tools knitted together. A decision to move to a full vendor
system would have been against Lundbeck's strategy, and, as our group
implemented more and more functionality in the internal systems, the
opposite strategy of using only in-house tools became the natural
direction.
Workfl ow support is evidently a need in drug discovery. Scientists need
to be able to see the upstream data in order to do their work. Therefore,
'integration projects' between different tools almost always follow after
acquisition of an 'of the shelf' software package. The times where one
takes software from the shelf, installs and runs it are truly rare. Even
between applications from the same vendor - where one would expect
smooth interfaces - integration projects were needed.
As commercial tools are generally closed source, the amount of
integration work Lundbeck is able to do, either in-house or through hired
local programmers with relevant technology knowledge is very limited.
This means that on top of paying fairly expensive software licences, the
organisation has to hire the vendor's consultants to do all the integration
work and they can cost £1000/day. If one part of the workfl ow is later
upgraded, all integrations have to be upgraded/re-done resulting in even
more expensive integration projects. Supporting such a system becomes a
never-ending story of upgrading and integrating, leaving less time for
other optimisations.
At that time the internal Research Informatics UI offering was a
mixture of old Oracle Forms-based query and update forms and some
Perl web applications that were created during a period of trying to move
away from Oracle Forms. However, this move towards fully web-based
interfaces was put on hold when Lundbeck decided to acquire Synaptic
Inc. [11] in 2003, leading to prioritisation of several global alignment
and integration projects into the portfolio.
Clearly, this created an even more heterogeneous environment, and an
overall strategic and architectural decision, enabling us to build a coherent
affordable and maintainable system for the future, was needed.
1.3 Ambition
With the current speed of technology developments, to think that one can
make a technology choice today and be 'prepared for the future' is an
illusion. Under these circumstances, how does one choose the right
technology stack?
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