The era of architecture

Part 1 of a 3-part series
By Jason Burke

In the 1980s when organizations operated predominantly via paper, the introduction of software technology was a transformative experience. The jump from manual to electronic activities brought with it substantial improvements in the way organizations conducted business. But the era of application-driven transformation for your business is over.

Today, even though life sciences is still a paper-intensive industry, we complete a major portion of our work with computers. We strive to find the ideal mix of paper and electronic solutions that can reasonably fulfill the business needs.

For example, not all clinical trials lend themselves to electronic data collection (EDC). But for those trials where EDC is appropriate, how much more efficient is one EDC solution than another? Despite vendor differences that may add considerable new value in design and functionality, the incremental value of one EDC vendor over another is significantly smaller than the value of initially moving from paper to EDC. So as business groups look to drive new levels of productivity and cost reduction in response to a changing R&D landscape, simply looking for that next new software program is not likely to bring considerably greater efficiency.

Where to make enhancements
If major improvements no longer magically appear by purchasing new applications, where will they come from? Consider that, in many cases, innovation occurs at boundaries. In other words, while you can make incremental improvements internally within a process, it is when that process intersects with others that more substantial opportunities for change occur. For example, teenagers have played music, passed notes, expressed strong opinions and chatted endlessly with friends for decades. But when those activities – some of which were already electronic – intersected the adoption of commodity consumer technology driven by the Internet, a rush of new products and activities appeared: portable music players, instant and text messaging, blogs, social networking sites and increasingly personal video.

In business terms, companies can look to innovate where boundaries naturally meet:

• Between organizational units, such as discovery, development, sales and marketing.
• Between functional units, such as clinical and statistics.
• Between business partners, such as sponsors, CROs and biotechs.
• Between organizational business processes, such as protocol design, statistical programming and surveillance.
• Between information sources, such as clinical, financial, safety, genomic and project management data.

Transforming technology boundaries into opportunity
Technology boundaries are usually described through architecture, a term that can be somewhat difficult to define. IEEE defines architecture as “the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution.” Even in this definition, there is an implicit relationship between architecture and innovation – architecture deals with the relationships between components (i.e., their boundaries) and how a design can change over time to accommodate innovation. In other words, architecture can provide a blueprint for how a company can use technology to enable innovation.

Architecture comes in many different variations based on what types of boundaries you wish to explore. The following table gives a brief list of some of the common types of architectures and the boundaries they address.

Architecture type	Scope	Boundaries
Industry	Connect disparate companies	Organizational and infrastructure
Enterprise	Connect disparate business units	Application and information
System	Connect software, hardware and communications into a solution	Hardware and network, such as an e-mail system
Network	Connect communications	Geographical and physical, such as the Internet
Information	Connect disparate information sources	Semantic interpretations
Application	Connect software modules	Software objects, such as those that make up an EDC system
Object	Connect computing algorithms within software modules	Software routines
Data	Connect logical data elements	Data items, such as “customer name”

Many people have already worked with architecture without realizing it was about innovation across boundaries. For example, business intelligence (BI) is one of the top IT spending priorities this year. BI is a type of solution that attempts to work across architectures to derive business insight from multiple applications and their corresponding data. The hope is to evolve – and innovate – business performance by looking at new and different relationships between information sources.

Even though this sounds simple, it actually represents a major challenge for life sciences firms. As an industry, we have been fortunate throughout our history to have the luxury of focusing on building or buying applications and not really having to worry so much about boundaries. When we did need to cross boundaries, we manually created “integrations” that evolved over time into complex designs that looked like linguini and were about as resilient to stressors. Many firms launched enterprise architecture efforts years ago, only to see the initiatives gradually devolve into nothing more than a list of preferred vendors and software.

Real innovation needs to be powered by real architecture, which requires a shift away from looking for the perfect application and instead focusing on establishing a platform on which our businesses can grow and evolve. Innovation requires a platform that can handle all of the various types of architectures and boundaries because we want the flexibility to innovate across all of them as new business demands and technologies emerge.

Do you need a clinical trials management application, or do you need a BI platform that can truly function across all boundaries? Should you continue to integrate your sales and marketing systems together on an ad hoc basis, or does it make more sense to find an integration platform that gives you more flexibility as your business begins to rely on more sophisticated, near-real-time multichannel analytics?

Your business and the innovations you must make are unique; so no single application can solve your whole future. But by introducing a greater focus on architecture to your planning processes, you can start to build the foundation for the next era of your company’s way to work.

In the next article in this series, I will address how you can use architecture to find and make improvements across boundaries.