The Document Hunter Pt. 2: Why Life Sciences Document Management Has Failed
Last post, I wrote about a clinical study project manager whose role had been reduced to nothing more than that of a document hunter. Instead of developing new and innovative means of study report creation, or paving the way for multimedia report review capabilities, she was spending 90% of her time just looking for documents. In my post I explained how life sciences companies got into this mess. The question now is, how do we fix it?
1) Get Back to Basics – First, take a step backwards and determine what is really necessary to improve how we find, manage, and use content today. For years, we added on bells and whistles that were seldom used, often broken, and difficult to maintain. Lesson learned: if it doesn’t help find a document more quickly, manage or share that content more easily, or allow organizations to adapt more rapidly to changing business and regulatory requirements, then it shouldn’t be done.
2) Collaborate in the Cloud – Remember when collaborating on content meant walking down the hall to meet with the team? Today we collaborate across teams, across organizations and across the world. Therefore, we need better, faster, and more secure ways of sharing information without the cost and overhead associated with VPNs, dedicated laptops, and other means of getting vendors and partners behind the firewall. How do we do this? Move to the regulated cloud. For some time now, organizations have used the cloud to share everything from sensitive financial documentation to biomedical research. The result? Better collaboration that can be set up in minutes, not days, weeks, or even months.
3) For Goodness’ Sake, Make it Easy – When was the last time you heard a document management user exclaim, “I love my 3-day training course on searching!” or “Woo hoo, folder navigation refresher training is next week!” Yes, it’s probably been a while. So why do we still need intense training, 600-page user manuals, and other support mechanisms for our current systems when doing things like ordering a book on Amazon.com or searching with Google is so easy? It’s not that the latter processes are so much simpler; in fact, consumer website processes are actually more complex. It’s that most current document management systems were designed pre-consumer web and are thus often incompatible with a modern user’s behavior. Leveraging the commonly understood and well-proven design and functionality from the consumer web can make systems dramatically easier to use and maintain. In other words, no more 3-day training or 600-page manuals – just log in and go.
4) Take Back Your IT! – Stop installing, upgrading, optimizing, normalizing, and managing things that fall into the category of “DMS upkeep” instead of “DMS value.” Life sciences organizations can get better performance, better functionality, and a more robust infrastructure by leveraging new content management capabilities through the cloud. Removing the burden of maintaining servers, installing updates, and managing upgrades lets IT departments focus on bringing new innovation and capabilities to their end user communities instead of just struggling to “keep the lights on.”
Change is coming to life sciences content management, and the landscape will look dramatically different in 5 years than it does today. Maintaining the status quo is no longer an option. Digital information is an asset that keeps growing in both volume and complexity. However, volume and complexity do not have to equal systems that are difficult to use or maintain. So simplify, collaborate, take advantage of the next generation of content management technologies, and turn your Document Hunters back into information producers.