www.pistoiaalliance.org

Thoughts on a Research Platform ArchitectureSimplify your application portfolio so you can focus on innovation

When times get tough, your CIO demands simplification of the portfolio. One approach is application rationalization based on SAP. R&D is different. SAP doesn’t align well to research needs.

However, the lessons of SAP, especially its architecture, are very relevant to research. These learnings have been copied by companies like Oracle to simplify global development IT.

But no such architecture platform exists for research. Fortunately, open source provides a path to achieve the same simplifications in a manner that meet research’s needs for agility and cost effectiveness.

Operational systems supporting business processes likely consume more than two thirds of your informatics portfolio.

Platform Architecture for operational systems

“I’m familiar with open source and love the price.”

BioPharma

“An integrated platform allows me to focus on innovation instead of interoperability issues.”

Vendors Academia

“Horizontal capabilities are available to me. I can focus my energy on building scientific applications and not IT components.”

(delivers business value)

built

on

top

of

Scientific Applications

Vendor App

Vendor App

Vendor App

Business Components

Inventory Management Others…

Information Integration

Reporting

Master Data Management

Process Integration

Messaging ProcessManagement

Application Server

(simplifies business applications & simplifies integration)

BusinessApplications

Foundational Components

Application Server

Messaging

Generic Inventory

Process Management

Reporting

Authoritative Data Services

No need for heavy-weight commercial EJB containers. Open-source application servers are more than sufficient for research. Even Microsoft IIS is good enough.

Apache HTTP Server Apache TomcatRabbitMQ

Our IT systems need to support the increasing externalization of research and enable the plug-and-play of entire systems and processes.

Systems and processes need to be loosely integrated, which is exactly what a messaging component gives you. Messaging also creates a foundation for standardization efforts relating to data interchange.

The open source options are arguably better than the COTS options. Many ESB options also available in open source.

Eclipse BIRT

Lab heads want insight into lab operations including real-time dashboards and historical metrics on throughput and cycle time.

Vendor App Report

Reporting Layer

generate

embeddedreport

query

The primary output of research is data. Research needs authoritative data services to simplify data integration tasks. Pistoia could define lightweight and generic approaches for achieving consistency in approach across all data services.

Does Walmart have an inventory system for books and another inventory system for electronics? Absolutely not!

Global Material Inventory

… into this!

Convert this…

MouseInventory

ReagentInventory

Cell linesinventory

Cell culturesinventory

BiologicsInventory #1

BiologicsInventory #2

CompoundInventory

Other inventories

Animalinventory

Business Rules - Research labs have many business rules that often need to be configurable without requiring IT involvement. Systems can then use the centralized rules to control application behavior.

Workflow - Many research processes can be modeled and executed with a workflow tool that makes process changes easy enough for lab scientists to do it themselves.

Events - Activity monitoring can capture data about process events on the fly and surface it through dashboards in the reporting layer.

Scheduling – Generic scheduling components can help with everything from efficiently computing static schedules to dynamically optimizing the allocation of work to lab resources based on priority

Summary