Life Sciences Domain Expertise

The Situation: There are many factors to consider for successful change. When planning for and implementing change, consider what should the change involve, how will the change impact workflow and technology, who will be impacted by the change, how fast should, and can the change occur, what are the costs of change, how will the success of the change be measured, etc. These factors are all important to the process. However, none is more critical than those factors that surround the cultural and organizational change – those changes that impact each and every employee on a personal basis.

The Situation: As the industry has moved to externalize more functional areas of R&D, one leading pharmaceutical company decided to rethink the associated information management strategy. Processes and information flows that were once second nature were now very different depending on the collaborating external partner and the agreed roles, processes, and information movement required for a contracted work effort. With increasing volume and varieties of work – experiments, studies, trials, programs – being externalized, and the number of partners with varying technical capabilities, the increasing information flow was becoming overwhelming. Older systems and infrastructure no longer supported the way the business had evolved and a new strategy was required.

The Situation: This global pharmaceutical company faced a challenge as the pace of research and development increased and a lack of consistency in how business rules were applied to data impacted their R&D organization’s ability to execute effectively. Seemingly simple business questions such as “which studies has a given investigator been associated with?” or “how many studies are behind in their enrollment efforts?” often required substantial staff effort to answer. Manually identifying, gathering, interpreting, cleansing, verifying and integrating data and information required significant time and labor investments.

The Situation: Data analytics solutions are being utilized with high expectations of delivering instantaneous insights to challenging business problems. In large pharmaceutical organizations these analytics solutions are often being applied in a siloed fashion in situations where people may spend significant time cobbling data together in spreadsheets for analysis. At the same time, the problems that organizations are trying to assess and the data required for analysis span broader company functions. Analytics has become an integral capability for tackling all sorts of business problems.

The Situation: Monitoring of the competitive environment, and acquisition and interpretation of competitive intelligence is vital to inform internal product development strategy. Knowing the competition’s target indications and development milestones, and what developmental issues have already been uncovered can help steer internal development activities. A large pharmaceutical organization had recognized the need to re-evaluate their capabilities in the competitive intelligence arena and to modernize their informatics tools used to monitor, filter, evaluate, disseminate and integrate relevant competitive intelligence information from both external and internal sources.

The Situation: Faced with increasing pressure to accelerate delivery of high-quality data for clinical decisions, the clinical data management department of a major pharmaceutical company knew they must radically change how they operated, but was unsure what the desired future state should encompass and unsure how to approach this large undertaking.

The Situation: This global pharmaceutical firm was struggling with implementation of new technologies for their information integration platform. Several key technologies associated with their platform vision were immature and they were actively engaged with small vendors to improve the scope of features and quality of their offerings in order to meet platform requirements. Projects were falling farther and farther behind schedule and the confidence of senior management was fading that this platform would be successfully implemented.

The Situation: In today’s environment of increasing competition, consolidation and drive toward operational effectiveness, having a clear picture of where an organization wants to go is essential to success. By necessity, Life Sciences organizations need to transform themselves in a way that integrates needed change associated with business process, technology, knowledge management, and organizational dynamics.