Pharmaceuticals Creating the Content Driven Enterprise to Shorten Time to Market

As a result, any thing that could be done to expedite the process produced great savings. This dynamic created a focus on the beginning of the drug discovery chain that has lead to its ultimate streamlining.

One of the tools used to streamline the process was content management. The expertise gained in content management is now poised to infiltrate the other pieces of the business chain, as well as be driven into the Enterprise, both inside and outside the company walls. It turns out that by getting a thorough understanding of the new information and associated content at drug discovery time can streamline the dissemination of that new drug information for both in-house purposes, like training, audit and reporting for compliance and regulation through Intranet applications, and public facing purposes through the Internet by disseminating up to date vital information to doctors, patients, researchers and business partners. This paper discusses how a Content Management System can be leveraged in all aspects of the information chain of a Pharma to produce an Information Architecture that facilitates rapid information dissemination.

The challenge today is how to take that new awareness of the value of content management and apply it to the rest of the business chain. An integral part of this new strategy is embracing the Internet and Intranet as an intricate part of their business and marketing tactics. These companies are now leveraging the ability to organize and repurpose their content for many new application purposes. These new applications include:

• E-learning for Sales and Support personnel
• Information portals for consumers
• Collaboration and Information exchange sites for industry partners
• Intranets for employees

The Content Driven Enterprise (CDE)

Refresh Software Corporation is building products for the next generation of content applications and services, which will enable the Content Driven Enterprise (CDE). The CDE has an infrastructure in place that takes advantage of a component infrastructure based on industry standards like SOA, uses an information model to organize and control its content, and integrates infrastructure and the information model with content centric applications.

The CDE promises to unlock the real value of digital content inside the enterprise. This has particularly broad ranging effects in the industry. The information that is being created by the R&D groups and pouring out of the laboratories into formal drug submission processes will eventually make its way into the public arena. Capturing this new information for reuse and repurposing of this data at creation is imperative if you want to keep a market edge.

The underlying premise of the CDE is that organizations that create a more agile information infrastructure will reap the benefits of repurposing, reusing and easily maintaining their corporate content.
Pharmaceutical companies are content heavy organizations. Not only do they produce large amounts of paper and electronic content, but they also use and incorporate 3rd party research as well as partner content. The result is a vast amount of information to organize and keep track of.

The relationship between the pharmaceutical industry, University and Government research labs, public agencies and bio-informatics companies only complicates the problem of information sharing. Most pharmaceutical companies have a diverse geographical structure resulting in a distributed IT infrastructure. This means that content and associated data are being created and residing in disperse locales. The impact is that there is no central place to store, categorize and manage content. To compound the dilemma further, few firms have taken the time to create an Information Architecture that organizing its content and associated work flow procedures into an efficient organic whole.

The need to exchange and use this information in order deliver products to market faster has created an increasing demand for sharing of content between public and private labs and partner firms. This is why a new generation of repository technology is aiding greatly in helping projects get quickly from concept to reality. The repository must allow secure sharing of content across

LANs but WANs.

The Content Repository

The Refresh Software SR2 content repository is a software application that resides on a database. The Content Repository’s primary function is one of centralized storage for enterprise content, while keeping track of any changes made to the content, and providing workflow process capability associated with the content. As stated above, the content repository is the central integration point between the created content and the web applications that utilize the content. The repository has been designed in a completely open approach, enabling web developers to tune the system for integration with other applications or additional reporting tools.

Refresh has once again taken an alternative approach to the Content Management process in that the SR2 content repository is viewed as a component within an enterprise infrastructure. With this open approach, the repository may be utilized by many other applications beyond the enterprise CMS.

The goal of any Content Management System is to provide the organization with a repository of reusable content that can be used for information distribution and change management, while leveraging the assets already in place. When assessing your CMS needs, it is tempting to go with a one-stop, end-to-end solution, but with these solutions often come the challenges of proprietary languages and methods. Refresh Software believes in the flexibility of choice, the ability to select best-of-breed components as the underlying foundation for both your information architecture and for your content management system.Refresh calls this Component Content Management.

Component Content Management

The Component Content Management process can be thought of in three distinct parts all based on an underlying Repository. These three parts; Content Creation, Content Change Management and Content Publication, all critical components to the Content Management process, however it is the distinction between the three that leads to the sum being greater than the parts.
Last generation Content Management tools attempt to group this entire process in a large, monolithic architecture, requiring you to adopt their proprietary language, environment and philosophy. The pharmaceutical business revolves around time to market.

Therefore IT is always on the look out for ways to make their IT infrastructure more flexible and fluid so that it may easily adjust as situation and application demands change. This philosophy now also applies to Marketing Departments.

The most compelling aspect of the Refresh product from a marketing perspective is how to introduce and integrate state of the art marketing techniques into your web strategy.

Pharmaceutical Marketing Strategies

Widespread use of the web by patients, healthcare professionals, and insurers has fundamentally changed the landscape of how to organize and disperse relevant timely information to these constituents. Adroit pharmaceutical marketing groups can rapidly deploy disease specific web sites that educate their audience about the product benefits and proper use. Most pharmaceutical companies now have plans in place to drive consumers to these web sites through Direct Marketing campaigns. The end goal is creating an ongoing informative dialog between the consumer and the pharmaceutical firm that will foster a long term relationship that will directly impact the bottom-line.

Market dynamics are driving pharmaceutical organizations to evolve in the ways they sell and market their products, launching a few new products instead of one increase the chances of getting a market winner. Regulatory enforcement of advertising and promotion content has forced a change in the way information is presented and ultimately scrutinized.

How you train your sales force to sell these new products has under gone a dramatic change. Doctors want instant access to drug content online. Patients want access to drug-related information at any time and place that suits them. All corporate constituents expect access to relevant content in the most convenient way possible and to want to get it 24-7. As the amount of relevant content increases, so does the utilization, which lowers the cost of support, strengthens brand, and creates dialog.

Taxonomy and Search

Taxonomy management is playing a larger role in marketing campaigns and programs as marketers become more sophisticated in how they can use the web. Corporate taxonomies are increasingly used in information systems particularly in content management systems, as a way to allow instant access to the right information within exponentially growing volumes of unstructured content. Refresh Software allows via our Taxonomy Manager, the simple creation and management of taxonomies, proven to be a serious competitor to heavy data mining systems, contextual filtering applications, and the overly complex CRM personalization modules used for "pushing" content on a Web site or delivering product advertising and promotions in a targeted way.

A company can buy or create a corporate taxonomy as well as have individuals inside a corporation create, associate and manage their own taxonomies. This is a powerful approach to harvest and map unstructured data. Taxonomies can help create really efficient solutions for marketers who want to target, promote and inform as an integral part of their web strategy. Once again one of the keys is in defining the Information Architecture. When the Information Architecture is completed and defined the associative taxonomies become part of the information model.

Empowering a content creator, to easily point and click their way through at set up time, one of his/hers particular pieces of content so that it can be classified, valued, weighted, targeted, and predefined from the get go for one or many aspects of measurement and analysis is very powerful. Refresh believes that using a bottom-up approach at authoring and editing time is a big paradigm shift. We are essentially changing the way measurement and analytics is traditionally done giving marketers the ability to globally extend all content with meta-data attributes for better measurement and targeting

The news here for the marketer is that any page can be divided up into many content pieces or “chunks” and each chunk can have built in from the bottom up for specific messaging and measurement capability at time of creation. Anyone in Marketing can define and change labels real-time (with appropriate permissions). Much more granular – affording anyone the ability to now label “chunks of content” on a page and also permits adding meta data to these content chunks giving Marketing more data to work with for example: weight and value the content at creation so later may be used by a profile engine. Finally, because of the SR2 CMS built in versioning, a must for regulatory reporting if Marketing changes their tracking labels, they will always know what the previous label was and never lose track of an asset’s usage.

The SR2 GUI has a distinctive web 2.0 “look and feel” with an accompanying activity dashboard that provides a birds-eye-view of all work, to be scheduled, in process, stalled, and recently published. The powerful WYSIWYG Editor is very intuitive because of its MS WORD look and feel. Whatever your companies needs are you will find that Refresh basic tenants and philosophy is always to remain open, flexible and configurable.

Pharmaceutical New Business Goals

Most Pharma’s today have seen the benefits of their initial content management efforts on improving new drug submissions processes. As the market for new drugs moves forward the methodology for moving new drugs into the market is changing. Deploying Refresh Software’s SR2 CMS will help you in the following areas:

• Improve R&D Collaboration Capabilities
• Speed Time to Market
• Enhance Information Dissemination

Pharmaceutical organizations can benefit from starting with a solid content management plan, based on the unified information model incorporated with a cogent information strategy. Sharing information, empowering all of your constituents with as much relevant and timely information as possible as rapidly as you can by using a powerful scalable technology like SR2 from Refresh Software will help provide the edge your team needs.