The Laszlo Letter

IBM buys into Complex Event Processing (CEP)

I have been following the progress of a small company called AptSoft for about two years. AptSoft markets a solution for Complex Event Processing (CEP), a niche capability that is a close cousin of Business Process Management (BPM).

As I have reported here not long ago, I have been struck by the great emphasis our industry has put on process reengineering while almost ignoring the important role that BPM tools could play to make such reengineering easier and more effective. So, I have been reluctant to add CEP into the mix under the assumption that our industry was just not ready for it.

Now comes the important news that IBM has purchased AptSoft and will make it part of its WebSphere business. This move by IBM will give greater legitimacy to CEP even if it only becomes a part of a larger set of middleware and SOA offerings.

The move also means that the biopharma industry should take a closer look at the way that CEP could be used througout the business. But just what are these application areas?

Well, I don't have a nice compact list to share with you. Suffice it to say that CEP can help in circumstances where the potential consequence of a sequence of events are not known. In other words, you can use BPM when you know for sure what effects a certain action can have. You can use CEP if you don't know any or all of the effects that may transpire. Donald Rumsfeld would call these the unknown unknowns. And, as an added bonus, CEP would let you figure out how to handle these unknowns as they happen.

OK, I'll give you one example: Supply chain management in case of a pandemic of unknown size and location.

The Laszlo Top 10 List

Reasons why vendors/service providers don't make the sale

Companies that serve the biopharma industry exist in a highly competitive environment. Whether the competition is another vendor, an internal solution or the buyer's ultimate decision to do nothing, vendors must be cognizant of the factors that may work against them when selling themselves and their solutions.

Having worked as both a buyer and a seller in our industry, here are my Top 10 reasons (in descending order of importance) why vendors fail to make the sale:

10. Prior unacceptable performance and/or the perceived bad reputation of your company has eliminated you as a viable partner;

9. You have seriously misread the customer's requirements and the ability of your solution to meet them;

8. The total cost (i.e. total cost of ownership) of the solution is greater than its perceived value by the client;

7. The competition has greater clout, recognition (i.e. older, larger, diverse) and leverage than your company (i.e. newer, smaller, focused);

6. Your customer-facing staff have little or inadequate understanding of the clients business and working environment;

5. The solution does not meet 80% of customer requirements out-of-the-box;

4. The references provided and/or the market share data provided are deemed to be inadequate by the client;

3. The client has failed to properly scope the project or set the selection criteria;

2. You have failed to understand, consider and/or communicate the unique circumstances of the client;

1. You have failed to build a consultative and trusting relationship with the client.

What is striking about this list, is that very few of the reasons are based on the technical inadequacy of the product or service. Human factors always rise to the top.

Downgrading from Vista to XP

If you recently bought a new PC or laptop, it is likely that it came packaged with the MS Vista operating system. Unfortunately, while Vista may be prettier than XP, it comes with a lot of baggage and some erratic/annoying behavior. Personally, I hate it.

Assuming that you work for a biopharma company, it is also likely that they have not yet switched to Vista and will not support any machine that is running it. So, if you want to do something work related on your Vista machine, you won't be able to get technical support from your employer.

If you are just now in the market for a new PC/laptop, then make sure that it comes pre-loaded with XP and not Vista. You will specifically have to ask for this "downgrade."

If you are in the less enviable position of having a PC with Vista already on it, then you will need to take the somewhat painful step of converting from one OS to another. Luckily, there is a new article in Information Week that will help you prepare for and execute this task. Make sure you set aside a whole morning or afternoon for this, since I don't believe the statement in the article that it should only take a few hours!

USA Presidential Candidate Healthcare Proposals

A Public Service Announcement

Healthcare is a top-of-mind issue for most of us living in the United States. Perhaps it is a lesser issue for those in the 18-29 age group, the segment of the population that is most looking forward to a drastic change in direction for the country. Anyone older, however, is truly concerned about adequate or catastrophic healthcare coverage.

So, how is one to tell how well each of the Presidential candidates have thought about this issue? Luckily, Stephen Beller has taken the time to do such a comparison and it's my intent here to just let you link to it and decide for yourself which candidate offers the "best" solution.

Happy reading!

How big an IT staff do you really need?

It's Sunday and thus a relatively peaceful day. A day that gives me a chance to see what others are writing about our industry.

So, I wanted to share with you a quite sobering and clinical piece about the method a drug company should/could use to figure out how many people they need to run their R&D operations. The post appears on the IN VIVO blog.

Now, I don't particularly want to say anything about this post since you can just as easily read it yourself. What I do want to do is pose a question to the biopharma CIOs out there: "Have you ever thought about determining optimal and/or minimally sufficient IT staffing levels using a strictly clinical approach?"

This reminds me of that craze from the late 1970's called "zero based budgeting (ZBB)," that our then President, Jimmy Carter, brought into use for the federal budget. According to this article, ZBB "puts the burden of proof on the manager, and demands that each manager justify the entire budget in detail and prove why he or she should spend the organization's money in the manner proposed." It matters not whether the program being budgeted already exists or is brand new. It has to be justified/re-justified with each new budget cycle.

The approach suggested by the IN VIVO post seems to make a lot of sense to me at a time when the biopharma industry is going through tremendous upheaval and a prolonged period of meager new product introductions. Add to these the pressures on drug pricing, product litigation, greater reliance on outsourcing, budget cutbacks, staff reductions and many other factors, the CIO can no longer simply increase the IT budget by a few percentage points.

Whatever budgeting approach is taken, it must incorporate several key elements:

1. A true understanding of the corporate mission and product strategy;
2. An impact analysis on IT programs of the mission and product strategy;
3. A critical evaluation of required current and future IT skills within the organization;
4. A determination of what skills need to be retained, dropped or outsourced;
5. A prioritization of IT projects including an impact analysis related to the consequences of non-implementation or cessation;
6. A systematic evaluation of the IT infrastructure and the opportunities available for consolidation and/or replacement to achieve maximum performance at minimum cost; and
7. An analysis of key applications/services and the potential for license fee reductions (with current or alternative vendors) or migration to a SaaS model.

Doing all of this will not be easy or pain free. Realistically, it can only be done properly if the budget preparation is begun at least a year before the start of the next fiscal year. Just how many CIOs will have the stomach for this is not clear to me. I do know, however, that the current approach is no longer sufficient.

The Reading List - 1Q 2008

In the era of instant gratification, it is good to remember that it sometimes pays to take a deeper dive into certain subjects. With that in mind, here is a list of books that will be published in the first quarter of 2008.

If you like controversy, February and March are the months for you when the following titles will hit the streets:

• Before You Take that Pill: Why Big Pharma Is Bad for Your Health.
• Values in Medicine: What are We Really Doing to Patients?
• Our Daily Meds: How the Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves into Slick Marketing Machines and Hooked the Nation on Prescription Drugs

So, put down that magazine and curl up with a good book.

The Laszlo Letter Gets 1,300 Visitors per Month

I am happy to report that in 2007, The Laszlo Letter has been getting roughly 1,300 visits per month. As the graph to the left will show, each visitor views at least two pages per visit. I attribute this to my common practice of showing a brief introduction to a new posting on the first page and continuing with the body of the article on the second page.

Months with the highest number of visits are October, September, November and January. October got close to 2,000 visits but I am not able to tell you why. As you would expect, readership drops off in December and picks up again in January.

Readers typically stay on the site somewhere between 2 and 2.5 minutes per visit.

While these statistics are gratifying, my goal for 2008 is to significantly expand the audience base and hopfully triple visits per month. Your help spreading the word will be appreciated.