The Human Element

Information technology is a contentious topic in almost any business setting. New developments in IT and automation are invariably linked to big changes in work processes, which tend to rub organizations and workers the wrong way. Take the installation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software—a mania that swept industries worldwide during the reengineering craze of the 1990s. Supporting a vision of the future promulgated by consultants, software vendors, and a few forward-looking company employees, ERP software meant a huge IT makeover. Horror stories abounded, and most people still cringe at the word reengineering. But over the course of a decade, virtually all large corporations installed ERP software and now would have a hard time doing business without it. A vision of the digital future in the laboratory has taken longer to emerge, partly because of the extraordinary mix of equipment that would have to be integrated in most labs and ...