The Laszlo Letter

The High Cost of Swimming Upstream with IT Projects

Setting the scope of an IT project is possibly the most important factor affecting it's chance for success or failure. While most project do end up delivering some benefits, they rarely deliver everything that was hoped for.

Even when projects succeed, we may still be left clueless about unintended consequences. This is the main point of an article I recently wrote in the June issue of Pharmaceutical Executive Europe called "The High Cost of Swimming Upstream."

Just click on the title to see the article.

IMS Health - Sales Force Effectiveness with BI

My last post focused on the AstraZeneca "Zubillaga" affair. If you recall, Mr. Zubillaga was fired after his crass remarks about physicians offices were made public in the blogosphere.

What was not questioned by anyone, however, was whether what he said is actually true or not. In particular, can the following statement be taken at face value?

"The more times you are in [the doctors office], the more money goes in your pocket."

As a recent article by Chris Nickum of IMS Health nicely illustrates, making frequent calls on physicians does not necessarily translate into increased revenues.

It seems that working smarter (by using business intelligence) is better than working harder.

Industry News via Google - How to get...

You probably know how hard it is to keep up to date on topics relevant to your job. For the most part, we tend to rely on browsing (in print or on-line) our favorite publications. Sometimes, when we want to be more thorough, we conduct searches on the Internet or in on-line bibliographic or full text databases.

These are both good methods. What they don't provide, however, is a way to keep continuously up-to-date on the topic at hand.

For that, there is now a pretty good method combining Google searches and news feeds.

Here are the three key steps to get going:

On Application Systems Documentation

One of my recommendations to CIOs for 2007 was to focus on infrastructure rationalization and consolidation. With this post, I'd like to extend that concept to application systems documentation.

If you have ever implemented or maintained a new application within this industry, you know how expensive and time consuming it is to generate and maintain documentation. This is especially difficult when validated systems are involved.

Working on several of these in the past few months have made me painfully aware of the demands documentation places on an organization. That, in turn, led me to the conclusion that there are better ways of dealing with this necessary evil.

On Consulting and Consultants

I have been considering writing about Consulting and Consultants for quite some time but somehow never get around to doing it. Since I am a consultant, my wife would probably tell me that there must be some deep seated psychological reason holding me back. She may be right about that.

In any case, back in November 2006 I cut out an article from Optimize Magazine called The Advice Paradox. You guessed it, it talks about the need for hiring consultants and the somewhat likely result that you won't be quite happy with their performance.

So, here we are in February, 2007 and it's time for me to get over my writer's block and begin a journey on the consulting highway...

Time to Market in Dollars and Cents

In a previous post titled "I'm Going to Strangle Someone," I noted that it's time to stop beating a dead horse by citing that "For every day that is lost getting a drug to market, X million dollars are lost in daily sales."

I thought that no more needed to be said about this topic. Until today, that is, when I read an enlightening article in Specialty Pharma magazine by Joseph Bossart entitled "Estimating the value of time in biopharmaceutical development." Click HERE to download a PDF version of the entire issue.

It turns out that by modeling the potential sales and profits of a product over its marketable life span, it is possible to make an educated decision whether buying time through increased investment in R&D makes financial sense or not.

Protocol Design and Trial Execution

Pharmaceutical Executive shipped a supplement with its June 2006 issue titled "Successful Clinical Trials Management." While the lead article in the supplement was about Offshoring, an insightful article by David Zuckerman on clinical trial design and quality caught my eye.

CRO's and Consultants Get No Respect

My friend, Mike Martorelli, poses an interesting question to the readers of the June 2006 issue of Contract Pharma magazine. To whit, "Do sponsors look to outsourcing providers for innovation? Or do they just want their CRO, laboratory, software provider, or instrument/reagent manufacturer to complete the specific task called for in a particular contract?"

Note: The article is not available on the web site. So if you don't subscribe to Contract Pharma, now may be a good time to sign up!

Computer System Audits and Compliance

I have always had mixed feelings about the Drug Information Journal. While it is the official publication of the Drug Information Association, the articles vary widely in quality and the topics covered are all over the map. Nevertheless, it is always worth reviewing the table of contents to see if any article looks promising.

Such was the case with the subtly humorous and philosophical article by Jacques Mourrain, PhD of Genentech, called "Apples and Oranges: Comparing Computer System Audits."

Prescribing Data and the Chief Compliance Officer

With summer just around the corner, America's doctors will need to decide if they want to "opt-out" of the disclosure of their prescribing habits to the pharmaceutical sales representative. For it is on July 1st that the American Medical Association (AMA) will start the Prescribing Data Restriction Program (PDRP) and request each of their members to make this important decision.

If physicians take the opt-out route, it has to be assumed that the companies collecting and selling the data and the companies buying them will take the necessary steps to comply with the wishes of those physicians.

It is here that the Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) must step in to make sure that the rules are followed.