Life science KM leaders discuss data search, reuse
“You can hear what the buzz is in other departments,” Shafai said. Another effort involves creating daily, weekly or monthly alerts to notify a small group of people within a company. Whether related to a particular topic of interest or to a clinical program, medical affairs can use e-mail to point out new information to targeted committees or groups. Dashboard layouts of pertinent information are becoming more valuable as well, she added.
Getting people not to hate search
At the other end of the size spectrum from Ironwood is Pfizer, a company with 77,000 employees and annual revenue of $56 billion. Bev Buckta, director of R&D information architecture, and Fran Holly, director of enterprise search and retrieval solutions for Pfizer Business Technology, gave a talk about improving search to support clinical operations.
Their job is to help researchers find information and to put it in context. Over the years, Pfizer has grown by acquisition, and along the way products and compounds came in under different names and numbering systems. It would take a long time to search for information to develop a safety review plan because one drug could be labeled many different things.
“We wanted researchers to spend less time searching and get more comprehensive search results,” Buckta said. They created a taxonomy management backbone that automates creating drug synonyms, which in turn improves the precision of searches without slowing them down. Researchers can spend less time getting to the content needed. They are now able to narrow the scope of search to the document types they need. One query now returns results for term plus synonyms. “It seems like a low bar,” Holly says, “but I just want people not to hate search.”
Convincing researchers that reuse is imperative
John Koch, director of scientific information architecture at Merck (merck.com), talked about his company’s efforts to improve reuse of information within the organization. “We have 50,000 SharePoint sites. That is a problem,” he said. With the amount and complexity of information exploding, he added, “we have to convince leaders that reuse of this information is imperative.”
He described combating a culture of single use, in which scientists integrate and analyze data, and then it goes on their hard drive. “We are trying to help them see the value of capturing that data so it can be reused.”
His team is modeling how information and data flows across the company and interviewing hundreds of employees about how knowledge is created and who should have access to it. “We also did canvassing external to Merck and pharma to look at best practices in creating a culture of information sharing,” he said.
One effort at Merck has been to change the way the company develops search and analytics applications to an agile method that iterates rapidly based on user feedback. Every two weeks they roll out new features in search and analytics applications. They then survey users and ask if the changes are positive to their jobs.
“We are helping scientists move away from spending 75 percent of their time finding information,” Koch said. “We want them to spend more time analyzing and less time finding the data.”