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"Knowledge management" may sound like just another buzzword or a
consultant's approach du jour, but it's turning out to be more than a
mere management trend. Instead, knowledge management is quietly shaping
how pharmaceutical companies do business. The likes of Eli Lilly, Pfizer
and Millennium Pharmaceuticals have undertaken knowledge management
initiatives, and many other large and small pharma companies have
integrated knowledge management into their organizations in some form or
another.
Knowledge management will be a key topic at the DIA's clinical data
management conference this spring, and that's just
one of many
places the subject is sure to be popping up. Despite all the recent
discussion, many wonder what knowledge management really is, and more
importantly, what can it do for their drug development organization?
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| An intuitive definition |
"The pharmaceutical industry is a bit unique in the sense that what
pharma and biotechs essentially do is collect and manage knowledge. They
don't make widgets — they take a potentially useful compound, perform
lots of studies on it and generate information about it. It's critical
to manage that information as efficiently as possible because it costs
so much and takes so long to develop a drug," says
Kevin Johnson,
Ph.D., MBA of PharmaKnowledge, a consulting company for the
pharmaceutical industry.
But pharmaceutical companies sometimes get mired in the amount of
information they produce. If finding the right compound is like looking
for a needle in a haystack, Johnson notes that the proverbial haystacks
keep getting larger, thanks to advances in molecular biology and the
genomics explosion. Proper information management throughout an
organization can go a long way toward focusing the search. Enter
knowledge management, which Johnson defines as "leveraging the
intellectual assets of the company to meet defined business objectives."
"Really, knowledge management is just a new name for what a company
should be doing if it's operating optimally anyway: sharing
information," Johnson says.
Martin D. Hynes, Ph.D., and his team at
Eli Lilly proved
just that a few years ago with their Projects Management Workbench, an
electronic repository built to manage all of Lilly's drug development
information.
"We built the Workbench as a tool to enhance communication, with a goal
of ultimately accelerating the drug development process. It was part of
our overall speed-to-market initiative. Somebody heard about our tool
and called me one day and said, 'You're really doing a nice job of
knowledge management,' and I thanked him — and promptly hung up and went
to figure out what knowledge management was all about."
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| Accidental knowledge management, deliberate
results |
The Projects Management Workbench turned into an enterprise-wide
knowledge management initiative at Lilly. Hynes and his team created a
definition of knowledge management and began assessing all of the
information tools in the organization based on that definition.
"We've developed a definition that considers five dimensions of
knowledge management: technology, the tools we use; process, the flow of
information or means of use; context, the environment or culture in
which we're operating; people, the psychology behind sharing
information; and content, the actual data itself," Hynes says. "We've
developed a rating tool that looks at each dimension, and we've applied
that instrument to many projects in the organization to find out how
well we're doing knowledge management."
The answer: "We keep getting better." Hynes' group has looked at their
Scientists' Professional Information Network (an R&D knowledge-sharing
program), Lilly's Portfolio Management System, as well as their own
Project Management Workbench. The company has also brought all those
tools together in an integrated information environment, framed on an
SAP-based enterprise resource planning system. Each has been assessed,
improved and, in some cases, designed on the five dimensions of the
knowledge management scale. Lilly has "positively impacted
speed-to-market as a result," Hynes says.
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| Tacit acknowledgement |
Hynes notes that, like most pharmaceutical companies, Lilly has
found that its strengths lie in the content and technology dimensions of
knowledge management. Pharmaceutical companies tend to have good
information and good tools for sharing it. But pharma companies are
likely not as strong at putting organizational processes into place for
sharing information, or considering the context (culture or environment)
in which the information exists.
Another aspect of knowledge management — one that many organizations
fail to recognize — is the distinction between explicit knowledge and
tacit knowledge.
"We need to tap into both sides. We have really good systems available
now to take care of the explicit knowledge — things you can document
like SOPs, other procedures and clinical data that can be managed
through intranets, document management systems and information
management systems," Johnson says. "The hard part is managing the tacit
knowledge. For example, you have a researcher who has been working in
oncology for 20 years. Now, you have a new clinical trial coming up, and
you'd love to tap into some of that information. How do you do that? How
do you tap into the experience, the intuition, the knowledge base that
is in her head?"
Johnson says the knowledge could be shared through making that tacit
knowledge explicit — having the researcher document his knowledge and
add it to a database of best practices that can be accessed by people
who need it.
"But, you may not be able to extract anything particularly valuable that
way. The knowledge is trapped in her experience, in her intuition and
much of it is nearly impossible to document. So, it may be more
productive to connect the person who needs the information with the
person who has it. The knowledge management questions are, 'How do I
identify people in my organization who have the expertise I need to
learn about? How do we share knowledge person-to-person?'"
Whether that's a directory of different thought leaders in a given
company or virtual meetings that bring subject matter experts together,
there are many ways to share tacit knowledge. The first step is
understanding that tacit knowledge exists, and the value it can offer an
organization.
Despite the varying definitions of knowledge management and the many
nuances that go along with them, knowledge management is fundamentally
just communication. Hynes, who insists he is not a knowledge management
professional but merely a drug developer trying to speed the process,
says that knowledge management is intrinsic to success: "Obviously,
people who share information and manage it in the right way end up with
a competitive advantage." |
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Copyright 2001 INC Research, Inc. (www.incresearch.com)
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