KM infrastructure for the life sciences virtual organization

Alleviating pain points at AstraZeneca

Pharmaceutical companies are turning to cloud-based tools for more traditional business collaboration outside the regulated, clinical environment.

“The concept of a firewall in general is going away, and not just in life sciences,” says David Smoley, CIO at global pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. “We partner with many companies, increasingly sharing information and data. In some cases, we are working with competitors and academic institutions.”

AstraZeneca has turned to the cloud-based content management platform Box for the agility and ease of use it offers. AstraZeneca uses Box for external collaboration between consultants and managed market groups. For instance, sales representatives use Box to access the most current collateral material from their mobile devices.

“It is now quite easy if we have a new partner to establish that sharing relationship, whereas in the legacy world you might have to spend days establishing passwords and user IDs and dealing with firewalls and codes,” Smoley says. “With Box, there is a comfort factor and a speed factor, and we can use it internally as well as externally. The greatest pain point was collaborating externally. That is an area where employees are the most thrilled with the new tool, but the greatest volume is probably internal, where there was also pain, but because they were inside the firewall, it was dealt with through e-mail, websites and file shares.”

Gaining acceptance of cloud-based tools requires some cultural change in large life science organizations. “On the one hand, we had to bring all the right folks together to acknowledge reality,” Smoley says. “The reality is if you go around an organization like AstraZeneca and look over people’s shoulders, you will find that employees are using all kinds of tools like Box. Life in IT these days is increasingly recognizing where the parade is and trying to get out in front of it, so you are not trailing. We knew there was a need to share. People were to some extent solving that problem on their own where they had to. We wanted to manage a portfolio of collaboration tools that are trusted, known and secure.”