Why life sciences companies need an end-to-end business service management solution

Tough challenges face pharmaceutical, medical devices and biotechnology companies today: longer time to market for new drugs or products; increased competition in a global marketplace; high research and development (R&D) costs; and complex compliance requirements. Addressing these challenges requires companies to rely on increasingly large, complex and interdependent applications that IT organizations have a hard time understanding and managing. To succeed, companies need to fully embrace IT to help grow the business, increase productivity and support innovation.

End-to-end business service management can help ease these woes. It maps end-to-end dependencies between infrastructure components, applications and the business processes they support. HP and BearingPoint have developed a Business Service Management solution for life sciences companies that provides IT organizations and application owners with real-time monitoring dashboards for applications and business processes. This holistic view of application monitoring facilitates communication and collaboration within and across IT support groups, allowing proactive responses to service degradations.

Read more about the benefits of end-to-end business service management and how it empowers life sciences companies to lead.

Why are life sciences companies adopting virtual desktops?

For those who don’t know, virtual desktops are self-contained operating system images abstracted from the underlying hardware that run as virtual images on servers hosted in a data center. They can be accessed through a laptop or workstation from any remote location where there is a network connection. A desktop can be assigned to one user, or a pool of computers can be made accessible to many users.

Access to the virtual desktop environment is flexible, but virtual desktops are tightly controlled within the data center, providing centralized information storage and encrypted data communications to remote users who have safe and secure connections.

Delivering traditional desktop environments to a large, often distributed, user base is challenging and costly. In addition to investments in hardware and software, desktop management challenges include the costs of maintaining and supporting desktop computers.

Life sciences companies are adopting virtual desktops as they also face security and privacy challenges, regulatory compliance issues and desktop reliability concerns. Virtual desktops allow sensitive information to reside in a central, secure location protected by data encryption and strictly enforced user policies. The ease with which OS images are designed and provisioned supports quick and simple desktop testing, qualifying and documenting. Advanced high-availability design and resource management provide ongoing desktop services that reduce business outages.

Read more on how life sciences companies are adopting virtual desktops to cut capital and operational expenditures, and streamline desktop management. Discover how virtual desktops can give users the flexibility to collaborate and innovate, while maintaining data security through encryption and centralized storage.

Measuring Healthcare Provider (HCP) Portal success

Max Duprat
Senior Manager
BearingPoint

Join BearingPoint Senior Manager, Max Duprat, as he explores the second in a series of podcasts which addresses how leading life sciences organizations are adopting a customer centric approach to marketing. In the first podcast of this series, we talked about the integration strategies for HCP portals as they relate to customer centricity. Today, we’re talking about how to measure the success of your HCP Portal.

Reporting and analytics is an important part of the overall success of an HCP Portal launch because it allows you to measure your progress towards your portal’s goals and also to gain insights into your HCP users’ preferences. While measuring progress is important, the real reason why analytics is a critical component of making your HCP Portal a success is because of the learnings gained from these measurements.

Throughout this podcast you will learn how your analytics approach should provide you with new insights into your customers’ preferences and behaviors. You will also learn the importance of defining and incorporating your analytics requirements early in the development process of your HCP portal. Tune in to find out more.

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Healthcare Provider Portals: Channel Integration Strategies

Max Duprat
Senior Manager
BearingPoint

Join BearingPoint Senior Manager, Max Duprat, as he explores the first in a series of podcasts which will address how leading life sciences organizations are adopting a customer centric approach to marketing through HEALTHCARE PROVIDER PORTALS, or HCPs. What we’re seeing is that many life sciences companies’ sales and marketing practices relating to customer interactions are losing their effectiveness, while the health care providers and consumers are continuously turning to the internet for medical information. So many life sciences companies are creating health care provider portals to address these challenges. And once the decision’s been made to develop an HCP portal, it begs the question “Should we develop the portal as a channel extension or as a stand alone brand?”

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Throughout this podcast you will learn the key considerations and lessons learned when deciding whether to make the HCP Portal a channel extension or stand alone channel. We also explore how your decision will impact future operations of the portal. Through working with many life sciences companies, those who’ve adopted a customer-centric approach to marketing are finding they can establish themselves as trusted partners, enhance the customer experience and enrich brand loyalty. Tune in to learn the secret to their success and ways to bring these strategies into your own environment.

Life Sciences Supply Chain: How mature is your organization?

Information technology (IT) departments within life sciences organizations are under constant pressure not only to maintain services but also improve them while controlling expenses. IT leaders face these daunting challenges amid funding constraints and continually shifting demands for IT resources. Combining supply chain principles with industry-leading practices, such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®), can create an effective framework for supporting cost transparency and IT resource capacity management to meet demand for IT services. Most organizations have some or all of the elements necessary to create an end-to-end supply chain, but these components are often at varying levels of maturity or are not integrated with other critical processes.

Read more about how to determine the maturity level of your organization’s IT supply chain, identify gaps and work towards an end-to-end solution that meets your service management needs.

Information management: why it’s essential for life sciences companies

Information is the backbone of life sciences organizations. When used
effectively and formally woven into the culture of an organization,
information can streamline processes and help an organization gain
competitive advantage.

But exponential growth in data volumes and complexity is posing a serious and daunting challenge across the industry. Simply managing information better in a technological sense is not enough. Life sciences organizations gain better control of enterprise information by understanding the scope and complexity of the data management problem and by defining the strategic business objectives of effective information management.

Read more about how life sciences companies can address these information management challenges.

IT Agility Can Drive Innovation

Supporting shared
IT services to
create business
value (146 KB)

It’s imperative to respond to new market dynamics and downward cost pressures. But this presents a challenging conundrum for life sciences companies. Globalization creates new opportunities but increases competitive pressures. Competition from generics is growing, as patents on blockbuster drugs expire. Big swings in global demand and broader regulatory oversight create even more challenges.

Life sciences companies must look to IT to help shape their business strategies and drive innovation. To achieve this goal, IT executives need to understand business goals and create strong partnerships between IT and business units. By evolving their IT models and systems to be more agile, companies can make it easy to work together across their ecosystems, sustain a competitive edge, meet regulatory and privacy requirements, leverage global economies of scale and support business innovation.

Read how to align your business and IT strategies.

We look forward to your comments.

Virtual Desktops

Over the past few years there has been a lot of buzz around virtualization, in particular virtual desktops. A virtual desktop is one where all computing happens remotely. It contains a very simple screen that allows you to replace the heavy workstations that are currently being used by the majority of companies. Virtual desktops provide a “virtual” space, in which the user can place all their application software.

Virtual desktops allow companies to house all the data and applications in one secure location; allowing someone to manage employee’s desktops, even when the computer is off. This podcast explores the importance of virtual desktops and why they are being hailed as the wave of the future.

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