What i3 Means to Us – Part 1

We sat down with Brady Haggstrom, Product Manager at IDBS, to find out what i³ means, and its highlights.

What do you look forward to most about coming to i³ events?

I look forward most to talking with customers and hearing about their challenges, what they’re thinking about for the future, really where they’re going. I think it’s a key part of our real voice of the customer – understanding where the market is going, what customer challenges we can help solve, how to improve and how to become a better company for all of our users.

What does i³ stand for?

The technical definition of i³ stands for Ideas, Insight and Innovation. But when we were thinking about creating i³, we were trying to think about the researchers, scientists, and those personnel that help support that overall IT structure and tech backbone for those researchers – what are they trying to get out of a conference like this? What do they use a tool like E-WorkBook for?

At the end of the day, we try to encapsulate the narrative of the scientific and innovative workplace -trying to get better ideas, trying to get better insight on how to be better, and then ultimately drive innovation.

Who attends i³?

Attendees range from super-users to directors of informatics to analysts and everybody in between. It’s the folks that are thinking about how to get more out of the technology tools that they use, how to support their own internal users and customer base, and forward-thinking tech professionals that are looking to drive innovation through E-WorkBook.

What are some of the benefits to those folks attending?

One, we always have it at such a great location, and the IDBS staff is down to have a great time and network with customers. But it really comes down to the ability to network with peers, understand and share challenges that you, as an E-WorkBook user have, and gain some real insight about where the platform is going, and how to get the most out of it for the path that you’re on to drive innovation.

Can you talk a little about a session that you presented at the last event?

I presented on the informatics landscape session, which was an interactive session. I talked about all these different data scenarios that are really tangential, parallel and associated with your E-WorkBook environment, and really your informatics environment as a whole. And what different scenarios customers are using to get value or get data out, or data access to better understand the science and research that they’re doing and provide that for scientists and users. We also wanted to get some feedback on how we can help customers accomplish those scenarios, and what they would prioritize if they were in our seats, and what to build first.

We take that customer feedback and action it in the next few months. It helps us focus our development resources.

You mentioned location. What makes a great i³ venue?

We pick the location for i³ based on somewhere accessible to our customer base, and usually some type of location that has a unique flare or aspect. Last year, it was Austin, which is the tech hub of the South, down in Texas, has tons of great food, great scenery and Lake Travis.

The year before that, i³ was in Seattle, which is the tech hub of the North West. We were up in the clouds, because we were thinking big and thinking about our own cloud platform.

Have you had any eye-opening insights or experiences at i³?

The insight that I’ve gained from i³ is the shared narrative around data insight and data access for the users and for their science. E-WorkBook  has been a real hub for scientific data alongside the ELN, and our various modules. But science requires more. Science requires doing things in different, related tools and technologies. Our customers are looking for their data to be richer – semantically. They want to be able to do more with the data that E-WorkBook has helped them collect and understand in the first place. And that’s what we’re working on every single day.

Find out more about this year’s i³ agenda here, or get in touch with our team.