KM infrastructure for the life sciences virtual organization

Kythera was one of the first customers of a cloud-based content management system focused on life sciences called Veeva (veeva.com) Vault. “It meets our needs as far as bringing documents all the way across the business continuum with the type of controls the Food & Drug Administration requires,” Hughes explains. “We have to verify all the documents were under a chain of control. Veeva Vault helps us manage regulated documents and control with a great deal of rigor without us having to build a system to do it. There is a range of needs within our organization, including working with external partners. They all have different layers of permissions and controls. Rather than having to do complex customizations, we can just turn on options already built into the system.”

According to Jennifer Goldsmith, who leads the Vault initiative for Veeva, smaller companies like Kythera don’t have expensive, large legacy systems to manage. “They come with no history or baggage,” she says, adding that the cloud offering allows them to get enterprise class systems at a fraction of the cost. “We can give Kythera the same features and functions as a Johnson & Johnson or Pfizer but based on how much they use it. If they have 10 users, they are going to pay for 10 users. You couldn’t do that before. You had to buy massive amounts of hardware and software and have people to maintain it. It was like running your own electric utility,” Goldsmith explains.

Another advantage of a multitenant cloud environment is the speed with which upgrades happen. “With traditional legacy implementations, we would spend 18 to 36 months from project kickoff to validated go-live. We are seeing that cycle time reduced to 12 weeks. It is a dramatic turnaround,” she says. “And with legacy systems, we would see major releases at best every year or every other year, and consuming those releases would take 18 to 24 months. Multitenancy in the cloud allows us to rapidly release new functions with minimal disruptions. We do releases three times a year.”

Open collaboration

Seeing those changes taking place in life sciences, Accenture—a management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company—has created its own Life Sciences Cloud to bring together multiple internal and external data sources across clinical, safety, regulatory and operational functions into a single analytics platform.

Geoff Schmidt, an Accenture managing director who leads global life sciences R&D technology, says the increasing use of strategic collaborations outside the four walls of large pharmaceutical companies led to the creation of Accenture Life Sciences Cloud for R&D. “It is not atypical for R&D CIOs to spend 60 plus percent of their budget and time on just keeping the lights on for current capabilities, and that leaves little left to innovate,” Schmidt says. “They aren’t dealing with just one major platform, but dozens of systems, many of which cost tens of millions to maintain and upgrade … As we get to more out-of-the-box, by-the-drink subscription platforms or applications, that is just one less thing those CIOs have to focus on.”

Accenture also has established a coalition of customers to help define the platform’s development path going forward, says Jonathan Burr, managing director, global offering lead for Accenture Life Sciences Cloud for R&D. “When we build new versions of the Life Sciences Cloud for R&D, it is not just Accenture going into a darkened room and coming out with something a year later and asking the industry whether they want to buy it,” Burr says. “We are actually driving incremental versions with the coalition. Heads of R&D and R&D IT sit on an executive steering committee helping us drive a high-level roadmap. Because clients are on product development focus groups and help with functionality testing, we get something we know is going to work across the coalition. Because we can work together in noncompetitive areas, we are creating something the clients wouldn’t get with a software company, because we are building it through open collaboration.”