Digital transformation of your laboratory is an exploratory learning process that can lead to a dramatic increase in throughput and quality in your lab while simultaneously improving staff job happiness.

This digital transformation process is not quite straightforward, though. Here, I will guide you on how to take the initial first steps of this journey. To begin with, you need to acknowledge that this is in fact a long journey with multiple steps and many opportunities for learning – a journey that also presents risks of significant failures, some of which you will likely make along the way. I will suggest different ways to address these risks with external help and resources.

Before diving into the gory details of the implementation of digital transformation, I suggest you start by taking a high-level overview of the “landscape” you are operating within. What are the pains and opportunities facing yourself and your colleagues? This includes time wasted on manual procedures as well as on redoing erroneous experiments. It also includes burdensome collaboration processes that could have been smoothed by efficient data-sharing tools or a lack of awareness of what your colleagues are doing. Typically, such a high-level summary will expose several easy wins that can guide you further exploration and give a sense of how much effort you need to put into this project and an idea of the potential benefits you can realize.

At this stage, you might have enough material to warrant the creation of a project team to explore the topic further and to start collecting support from senior people who can sponsor the project.

If you need external help to drive this project, this might be the time to start discussions with a company that can help you. Typically, consultants have collected experience from multiple digital transformation projects and can help you avoid some of the pitfalls facing you on this journey.

With the proper team in place, it is time to start to systematically evaluate how your lab operates – based on your high-level overview, you will need to define the initial scope of your analysis and then systematically analyze the workflows within that scope. Do involve the specific people carrying out each workflow and describe that workflow including the data being processed and the potential time being wasted and risks of errors during that workflow.

From this initial analysis, you can define the initial requirements for a digital solution and start gathering proposals for how to implement a solution. Whether you will use an internal department or an external company as your vendor, you will need to define the project and plan the implementation.

It is important to choose a vendor who will listen to your team and your requirements and do the necessary customization to match your specific workflows. These customizations are critical for the success of your project by ensuring that your user will actually adopt the system.

To carry out the implementation I strongly recommend an agile method whereby your system is implemented in smaller steps and collecting feedback and learnings from your team along the way. This learning process is key to a successful implementation. You also need to carry out adequate change management and on-boarding of your team to ensure that your users properly adopt your new system.