Andrew Daigle, NPDN IT Manager
The Communicator: Volume 5, Issue 9, September 2024
Welcome to this month’s IT Bytes. We here at NPDN information technology (IT) work very closely with your Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) to constantly improve the processes that allow the uploading, storage, and dissemination of NPDN data as information. With your input, we develop processes that streamline your interaction with the data and provide leadership with tools to utilize the data that is collected and uploaded to our datacenter. We rely on you, the NPDN members, to inform us of your IT needs to make this your IT system.
To be frank, we are not diagnosticians. We do not have the day-to-day experience that you have in your occupations. We are programmers and data scientists and designers. This team is very good at what it does. For example: when leadership tasked us with being able to include port of entry data, we provided that ability. But we wouldn’t have known it was a need without their input. If there are things that you think would make your interactions with your data better, i.e. easier/more efficient, let us know. If these things can be accomplished and if leadership approves, we would be glad to make your IT dream a reality.
We strive to maintain a balance between leading edge and trailing edge technologies. We do not want to implement strategies that open us to insecurity or that just aren’t proven yet. Remember “Clippy”? We also do not want our code to become unsupported or defunct. We call this the sweet spot for NPDN. We have looked at tools like artificial intelligence (AI) that are currently on everyone’s minds. We do not feel the technology has been proven enough yet and it is still flawed in many ways. We are taking a cautious approach with this emerging technology to ensure that we do not introduce any kind of instability to NPDN systems.
At the upcoming NPDN Conference we will have a table set up so that you can come and talk to us. Please bring us your IT desires and questions. You can always reach us at it@npdn.org. Also, please check out our poster at the conference where we discuss these issues.
