What it does: Freezerworks is a commercial piece of software that helps organize biological samples (bits of goo technically speaking) that are used in the School's research endeavours. Typically the goo is stored in freezers, you know those freezers that the hallways of MSRB 1,2,3 and Med Sci 1 & 2 etc have all over the place? They are full of very valuable (academically speaking) goo. This goo needs to be cataloged so investigators and their laboratory staffers know where the goo is and what the goo is.
Who it is for: Researchers and their lab staff.
Where did it come from: It's been around for awhile and is somewhat popular with researchers as it is somewhat easy to use and is cost effective for a limited scope. MICHR has been running it for sometime, but recently we negotiated migrating it's management over to MSIS so we can leverage it with the BioRepository Service we are working to spin up.
How does it fit in with us: We are going to try and design the BioRepository Service to have two managed products. One is the LabVantage product which is a large investment and a full bore laboratory management system for goo, while Freezerworks is a more easy to use but feature limited product. These fit within the Research IT portfolio that John Brussolo is accountable for within MSIS. Below is a picture that maybe helps visualize it. It's not set in stone, but I hope it helps. The pink colored shapes outline the investment along with some other investments in that portfolio for context. You'll note that we have different PAMs and Service Managers working within the research portfolio depending on their speciality and availability.
This is our service delivery model in practice. Neat huh?
Why oh why?: Why have two managed products? Well ideally I'm not sure we would and in fact, Freezerworks may be quite temporary while we as an organization determine the best way to leverage the LabVantage product. However for the time being, we get requests to facilitate Freezerworks and I wanted to avoid many many instances of Freezerworks. It is a well engineered product with a strong internal userbase we will be working with. I want to contain our Freezerworks instances, curate the business needs of the customers for biorepository purposes and help navigate them to the appropriate tool for their needs. It is not an exact science, but having the two managed products being serviced by a cohesive team is a step in the right direction.
Nice job Millard and team!
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