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[[File:|right|350px]] Title: What are the organizational justifications for a laboratory information management system (LIMS)?

Author for citation: Shawn E. Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: December 2023

Introduction

As a lab manager or stakeholder in your organization, you've concluded that a laboratory information management system (LIMS) makes the most sense for better managing workflows and data management practices. However, you may not be the primary decision maker for LIMS acquisition and deployment within your organization, which means you may have to present your case (i.e., provide justification) for the LIMS to those primary decision makers. This justification should first be based on factors that are closest to the lab's essential laboratory functions, and then on more traditional economic and practical considerations, justifications, and benefits to the lab, as well as the overall organization.

This brief topical article will examine organizational, economic, and practical justifications for LIMS acquisition, allowing you to better build a stronger case for LIMS acquisition.

LIMS justification focused on your organization

When discussing the justification of LIMS acquisition for an organization, it's easy to broadly speak about the typical challenges, requirements, and considerations for labs of all types. To be fair, this basic approach still provides important deductions about LIMS for the laboratory industry as a whole. However, no two laboratories are alike, and the challenges, requirements, and considerations for your laboratory may very well differ from the typical laboratory's. If the organization has already clearly researched and stated its goals and potential risks, then it has a head start on this organization-based justification for a LIMS; the benefits of a LIMS can be tied to meeting those goals and minimizing those potential risks.

Four questions can be asked when focusing on the organization justification of a LIMS:

• Why is acquiring a LIMS important to meeting the goals of your lab?
• What problems does the LIMS solve that currently affect your lab?
• What operational, financial, and personnel improvements do you expect to see in your lab because of LIMS implementation?
• Why is this important to the larger organization, as well as those outside the lab?

Before answering these questions, it may be important to familiarize yourself with a LIMS and what it's capable of doing to support laboratory operations. One could, for example, examine a document like LIMSpec—a specification document for laboratory informatics systems—to gain a better understanding of those capabilities. Once more informed, it will be easier to answer the four questions as they relate to your organization.

Regarding the first question, if your organization has already described its goals, you may start matching those LIMS capabilities to workflow and method improvement, as well as time savings, and then in turn link that to better achieving those goals. This turns into organizational justification for the LIMS to the primary decision makers for LIMS acquisition. If you can further make that goal-guided justification relevant and current to what's presently happening in the lab, then it’s all the better; "the goals that are timely and pressing are those that earn priority."

As for the second question on problems the LIMS may solve, those problems may be identified risks to the longevity of the organization, or they may be specific to a particular challenge posed by an existing laboratory process. Ideally, those risks and challenges have already been identified through a strategic planning process that successfully captures currently viewed and potential future risks to the business and how it achieves its mission-critical goals and priorities. Drawing upon these real and potential risks and process challenges helps you better justify how a LIMS can mitigate or prevent them.

Finally, addressing questions three and four involves analyzing potential and real benefits to the lab (and the overall organization) and—along with your answers to questions one and two—laying out the value judgment of the LIMS to not only the organization but also its internal and external stakeholders. That final question in particular recognizes that the same value judgment and "superior worth" applied internally also must be applied to the data and information recipients, i.e., the external stakeholders. It's easy to ask what you, the laboratorian, gain by shifting from paper-based methods to electronic methods, but it's worthy asking how clientele benefits from that transition too. Similar to how lab personnel may get surveyed as part of the LIMS acquisition process, one can imagine how conducting interviews with critical external stakeholders should reveal strong evidence that the long-term future of the lab and its customers will surely benefit from a LIMS.