| Boyd Robinson of BearingPoint’s Life Sciences Practice provides a fresh perspective on unified digital content
The pharmaceutical industry has long been at the forefront of leveraging digital content management (DCM) to support its business goals. In the 1990s, the industry’s emphasis was on regulatory submissions and controlled documents such as SOPs. These highly controlled DCM solutions were built to address that need and are still in use today. The industry, however, has moved on, and nowadays requires flexible solutions that support the modern virtual organisation.
Controlling information remains a high priority, but it is now also essential to be able to work effectively with external partners; for example biotechs and research labs working in R&D partnerships; outsourcers running critical business processes; offshore partners developing and operating new systems; and, of course, regulators driving ever closer supervision such as Sarbanes Oxley. In addition, the life science organisation that maintains an interoperable infrastructure and processes will have the advantage to quickly adapt to the next generation of industry opportunities.
Today, pharma companies typically have many islands of DCM – mature systems that are slow to change, difficult to integrate and increasingly costly to maintain. They have become a constraining factor to global operations and business change, as deployment rarely maintains pace with the business. The strategy of slowly knitting together these islands of content management is not going to deliver either the short- or longterm benefits that the industry now requires. Companies need to rethink their strategy in order to become more efficient and boost organisational flexibility, while maintaining regulatory compliance. A fresh perspective is required. |
