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Its a no-brainer today to talk about the need for bridging Information Technology (IT) with the pharmaceutical business. We all know that both business and IT stakeholders understand this extremely well. Everyone recognizes the value, but pharmaceutical companies are often still reluctant to commit fully to an IT initiative. Why is this the case?

The skepticism stems from concerns about delivering the right solution to address the business issues and needs at the right time, and not after the event is over. If IT needs to build a solution to improve product launch effectiveness, the solution has to be delivered before launching the campaign, and not after the brand team has exerted all of its energy into the campaign.

The key challenge is to make IT an integral part of the business operations. If Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC), engineering maintenance and raw materials management teams can become part of the core pharmaceutical manufacturing function, why not IT as well? Why is IT seen as an outsider?

The traditional tendency to treat IT as support to business reduces its potential to become a part of business and to deliver much more. The Booz Allen Hamilton and CIO survey¹ showed that in an organization where CIOs are part of the CEOs core team, IT showed healthier outputs than where they werent. Why, then, are CIOs not reporting to CEOs in every organization? The biggest reason is ITs inability to improve business operations and deliver value on time. Also, IT often fails to remain aligned with the pace of ever-changing business, as it has been more focused on managing todays tasks and not focused on future potential. IT must align itself closer to the business and demonstrate how technology-driven innovation can help businesses excel.

Factors that make business unhappy

Businesses often believe that IT teams are too focused on their job-at-hand and less on becoming a true business transformation partner that proactively thinks about technology-driven business improvement. The typical IT project requires businesses to provide the requirements and accept whatever solutions are delivered in the end. This approach leads to only about 30%² success in project delivery. 

What is the reason for such a high failure rate? From an IT point of view, the number one reason is not getting enough business time during the project. This is not specific to any project or business unit, but its the cultural construct in an organization that drives this business-IT work dynamic. Typically, businesses ask for technology help and then the IT team creates the solutions and asks business to accept them but this seldom produces the best results.

So, business and IT need a much closer working relationship. The collaboration process should not happen only when a project is being designed, but as an acceptable, regular practice to create a business-IT knowledge foundation that can be used in all projects. This knowledge foundation can make projects successful even with a minimum amount of business time invested. This encourages stakeholders to make IT a core business support function. This foundation can be created if business gets to know the solutions better and accepts accountability for project success. Unless IT collaborates with the business and shares knowledge to make all stakeholders understand the solution, the issues will remain. Currently, the industry is far from adopting this culture and many business-oriented IT projects do not see enough business participation. This situation must be resolved, and this can be done only with improved knowledge sharing between business and IT.

There are a few potentially tricky situations that make businesses nervous about adopting IT solutions:

Use of standard products:

1. Enterprise-level products are designed for many different industries. Force-fitting them for the pharmaceutical industry creates enormous customization challenges. IT teams do not come with enough business values to justify the changes.


2. Every company is unique in its own way of running its business operations. The overarching functions might remain similar, but companies might differ significantly at the operational level. So, even a standard product meant for the pharmaceutical industry may not fit into every business operation directly. This, again, requires significant business participation to make the product useful, but IT teams fail to justify this need with a convincing level of business improvements. In addition, the Individual preferences of IT project leads bring a personal level of choice into the mix. This, at times, may vary significantly from the standard way of doing things, which may make business unhappy. Organizations taking a process-driven approach see this as less applicable than the rest^{2, 3}.


3. The technology preferences of IT teams drives the selection of products which might not be optimal for the functionalities desired by the business. While business needs a product that perfectly matches its functionalities, it might not use a technology that is on the IT organizations preferred technology roadmap. This is a classic tradeoff between business needs and IT preference.

 The making of custom-built systems:

1. Functionalities actually delivered are a very low percentage of the desired functionalities agreed upon during the requirement gathering phase.^{2, 3}


2. More often than not, systems are delivered late, leading to missed business opportunities.


3. Businesses spend too much time getting the system up and running.


4. No single system is enough; too many systems are being used to complete a functionality end-to-end. This reduces business motivation to use such systems.

 Dilemma between niche apps and the enterprise

1. Enterprise-level systems lack specific needs to support a function (research, development, manufacturing, etc.) and customization of these products demands much business time involvement


2. Niche applications create a huge landscape needing much more integration, resulting in businesses being required to handle too many systems. Handing too many systems makes it unpopular in the eyes of business, and stand-alone systems fail to deliver values independently


3. When business operations need customization at a geographical level, or even at different units within the same geographies, the enterprise systems fail to deliver the fullest value

All of these factors contribute to making businesses unhappy. But the level of unhappiness is not weighty enough to jeopardize the majority of the projects. What actually reduces business involvement are the cultural differences between the functions. Both business and IT need to work toward creating a work culture that is more collaborative. This can be enhanced by showcasing the values every stakeholder contributes to making a project successful. This further supports the idea that IT functions need to be presented well and the business benefits outlined accordingly, so that neither function can overlook its necessity.

Businesses need to become more comfortable engaging with their IT operations and IT has to go beyond the tactical day-to-day operational mode in supporting business changes. This is possible only when both teams have a good understanding of each others needs.

When I managed a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, I hardly paid any attention to the IT initiatives - it was the least important task on my agenda. Now, I realize how wrong I was. My change in approach is a result of simply paying more attention to technology-driven innovation and greater knowledge, on my part,  of how IT can deliver business values. With this improved knowledge, I now strongly advocate the need to link IT with business for improved business operation.

Both business and IT understand that many of the factors that make businesses unhappy are external to the pharmaceutical organization, e.g. product companies. With new work cultures, both business and IT will be able to successfully deal with external factors. This helps in better customization of standard products, developing a system that exactly matches business needs and working together to deal with other technology barriers.  Creation of high level educational material, use of timely communication techniques, regular knowledge sharing sessions during breakfast or lunch and creating IT awareness campaigns could help build stronger bonds between IT and business.

A value-based approach from the IT team can change the face of IT in the eyes of business. Pharmaceutical organizations can gain much more value from their IT teams, just like many other industries. All the necessary materials exist to build a strong bridge between IT and business,  organizations need only decide that today is the day to begin this journey!

References:

1. CIO Publication, Jul 2008, Jun 2009


2. CHAOS report, Standish Group International


3.  Process Transformation for Better IT Services Delivery in the Pharmaceutical Industry By Kamal Biswas, Journal of GxP Compliance, Vol 11, No 4, July 2007


4. Viewpoint: Pharma Gain from Information, By Kamal Biswas, SETLabs Briefings, Infosys Technologies Research Publications, May 2008

About the author:

Kamal Biswas is a Senior Principal with the Life Sciences Practice at Infosys Consulting, Inc. Kamal is an expert in pharmaceutical manufacturing & technology strategy and regulatory compliance in FDA regulated industries. He has more than 15 years experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing operations and business consulting. He is a thought leader in pharma IT strategy, technology enabled productivity in pharmaceutical manufacturing operation, and regulatory compliance transformation. Kamal lives in New Jersey, USA, and can be reached at kamal_biswas@infosys.com.