Pharmaceutical Company

Problem:

• The organization's trial management group needed fast and easy access to key documents such as model documents, clinical forms, SOPs and guidelines. The challenge was that all of these documents were authored and managed by other groups in the company. The clinical trial management group was dependent on these other groups to make their information easy to locate. It wasn't happening. The groups that owned the information were unwilling or unable to modify their content to make it easier to locate.

Solution:

• Our information audit uncovered discovered where each of these documents existed and who owned and managed them.
• We designed a portal that allowed the clinical trial managers to locate the key documents they needed using Google-like search and category-navigation.
• Once we understood exactly what the content was and how to locate each piece, we worked with the clinical trial managers to define categories that made sense to their group. Once created, the portal gave this group the ability to maintain these categories to suit their needs going forward.
• The portal solution allowed the clinical manager to locate documents by cross-referencing categories and key words. The manager could type in the word "pregnant" and then select the document type "Form". He or she could cross-reference that with the topic "Informed Consent". The result would deliver Case Report Forms relating to Informed Consent forms specific to pregnancy in a matter of seconds.
• The power of this solution was to allow the customers of information add their own intelligence and categorization to content that they had no control over. It was similar to the concept of a folksonomy, where the categories are defined by consumers rather than authors or content owners.