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Every facility is different. What is best for you will depend on your workflow, your facility, and your requirements.
The ability to track and make optimal use of your animal and research data is critical in modern facilities. Reporting and legislative requirements are becoming more onerous; the volume of data you are required to keep track of is increasing; and researchers, ethics committees, and oversight bodies want their report or the answer to their question now. Even for smaller facilities, the days of being able to survive with a system based on workbooks or spreadsheets may well behind us. As a result, you’re probably using, looking for, or thinking about some sort of database solution to keep track of everything. And if that’s the case, there are a number of things you need to think about during the selection process, and some considerations for rolling the system out—some of which may not occur to you initially.
WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR?
Historically, there have been two types of colony management database solutions. The first is the program developed by the animal expert. The system “ticks all the boxes” from the animal scientist/facility manager/technician point of view since it’s built by an expert in the field, but unless your expert has an IT or computer science background, it may turn out to be not the greatest computer program from a software point of view. You may have stability problems, lack of scalability, or problems sharing data with other systems. They can also be tough to maintain—particularly if the original author moves on.
The second approach is the solution developed by the in-house IT team or outsourced to a software company. The traditional downfall of these systems is that while they may be great computer programs from a geek point of view, they don’t always work the way the facility staff and researchers need them to—the workflows suit the database or software platform, rather than the way things work inside the facility. If it’s a commercial solution you’re looking at, remember that even a half competent salesmen can run a faultless demo—but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work that well for you inside your facility or institution with real data.
A variation of this approach is to simply grab a copy of the program a nearby or collaborative facility uses. You need to be wary of software built specifically for another facility. If the facilities are very similar it may work brilliantly, but there’s a good chance you will have slightly different workflows—perhaps different accounting systems, ethics committee processes, cost recovery methods or reporting requirements. The borrowed solution must be flexible enough to adapt to your needs, not those of your neighboring facility.
There’s a reason there isn’t a single program that everyone uses all over the world—everyone works slightly differently. While the fundamentals may be similar across the various systems, at the end of the day the devil is in the detail; it’s the internal workflows and processes which will make or break the usability of the system you select. The best advice I can give you here is to get hands on with the products you’re evaluating— get a demo version or arrange a trial or pilot program. Take the trial seriously. These are big systems which will tie into a lot of what you do on a daily basis—you do not want to be stuck with something which is painful to use or requires large amounts of (potentially very expensive) customisation before it will work for you. If you end up with a system which complicates or obstructs the familiar workflows you have in place, people will find ways to avoid using the system— and you’re back to square one.