5 Clues Your Collaboration Isn’t Working

The Real Story Group, a CMS research and evaluation site, details the two main types of document management systems: transactional (think medical claims processing) and collaborative (such as those that manage submission documents for the life sciences industry). Indeed, collaboration is essential for life sciences companies today. Unlike in years past when most work was done in-house, organizations are now increasingly relying on partners and vendors to assist them with the intricate process of bringing a drug to market. Therefore, it’s essential that teams are able to work together seamlessly — and compliantly — to get the job done.

But do the systems that life sciences companies use to manage their regulated content help teams work together efficiently and cost-effectively? Here are five clues that your company’s content management systems are not collaborative:

1. You have to set up separate sites for each type of collaboration. One collaboration site would be manageable, maybe two. But for life sciences companies, the number of complexity of collaboration mechanisms is a lot higher. Setting up and maintaining these separate mechanisms is often difficult to manage, especially for emerging biotechs who don’t have the means to maintain multiple systems.

2. In the last 30 days, someone in your organization has emailed you a submission-related document. Despite the high compliance risk, this is too often a route many users take because they need a way to complete a task faster than their content management system accommodates it. The challenge with this is that there is no way to track or control what happens to the content once it leaves the system, opening the door for a multitude of potential compliance-related issues.

3. You need a separate software user license for each external collaborator. This can get expensive for large life sciences companies, and growing biotechs can’t be saddled with the headache of making sure they have enough user licenses available. This is especially painful when working with external users who only need access for a short period of time.

4. You need to send a laptop, VPN token to your external collaborators. In the Internet age, where you can share your personal photos with family across the world, or access your extensive music collection in a few clicks, there should be no need to access documents via a mailed laptop or custom VPN token. Collaborative, yet controlled, access to content should be no more difficult than accessing your secure email online.

5. Adding a new external collaborator into your system is measured in days, weeks, or months. It’s perfectly normal for a clinical study to stretch across months and even years, but taking that long to just add an external collaborator? Absurd, especially if you need those external collaborators during the clinical study process. By the time they’re added, the study may already be complete.

If any of these sound like things you do, you are stuck in the classic life sciences collaboration conundrum – how to collaborate quickly and easily in a compliance driven environment. For more information on this topic, see our white paper – Collaboration Conundrum: How to Share Content in Today’s Global Life Sciences Industry.

Do you find collaboration easier said than done at your company? How does your company collaborate?