While there has been a lot of discussion about the FDA’s view of Social Media I wrote last month about Gearing up IT for Future Growth. IT must become more relevant in supporting
the business and this new way of ‘collaboration.’ In last month’s blog post I spoke of how IT can be a catalyst for the business. There is a conflict in all this since IT budgets are constrained between maintaining the current IT landscape and investing in these new areas.
To get a better view on this dilemma I suggest you read this blog post on The Next Wave of Technology Led Business Gains written by a colleague of mine. His blog post is entitled Sadagopan’s Weblog, January 8th, 2012. In this article he describes the issues that benefit the business and yet prove challenging for IT.
Being a ‘social enterprise’ to me is all about the connections between your end customers and the products you sell. Within Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices investments have been made in the areas of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to help business process improvements and adoption for example: sales reps taking orders and processing quotes. Technology is providing opportunities to improve the ways in which companies can rapidly gain insight into the use of a medication or device.
Integration is the key in all this since the business is using social media tools to quickly gather up this data and transforming this into relevant information. Today I am working with several companies that are looking to improve their business processes via upgrades and ‘smarter’ deployment of this technology. The challenge is to ‘connect’ the output of social media for improved clinical trials or insight into existing device performance (via call center data and complaint tracking).
We are not quite there yet in ‘integrating’ social media with back office systems. Tools are being introduced to ease the ‘listening’ and ‘gathering’ of this data. I believe that Life Sciences companies would benefit from a better ‘collaboration’ with their patients and consumers of their products. As I see this progressing in the market I will offer an update to this blog post.
Thanks,
Jim