Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time in scientific labs and on drug manufacturing floors.  One of the common trends that I’ve noticed is the desire of the scientific community to get their work done.  This desire often stems from both personal work ethic and the time sensitive nature of the research many life science companies are performing.  While this work ethic is typically the type of mentality you’d love in an employee it makes life science companies vulnerable to issues arising from a lack of (or slow) communication; especially when that communication has to cross functional and departmental lines.

One of the most effective and successful solutions that MUSA has come up with is a communication model that enforces regular meetings with both the scientific stakeholders and those in IT.  Using this model a partnership between the scientific community and IT is formed, helping everyone get on the same page. During meetings scientific team members are tasked with updating their IT counterparts with feedback from their colleagues.  This feedback should include, but not be limited to:  plans for purchasing and installing new instrumentation (since most has an IT component), need for additional capabilities that’s often met by rolling out new software packages, upcoming initiatives that may require a spike in IT services (storage, processing power, etc), and so on.

By ensuring that communication lanes stay open, the scientific community can benefit from having IT assist in evaluating new products and ensure that the proper resources are in place before they’re needed.  This results in a more stable environment and less headache over time.  In turn, IT team members should be updating their scientific colleagues on any work being planned that may have an impact on tasks being carried out in the labs or on the manufacturing floor.  Experiments and drug lot production often run for long periods of time and can be extremely sensitive to even small blips in service availability.

By implementing this type of Scientific IT team, MUSA has helped many of our clients realize a significant improvement in communication between the IT and scientific communities.  Improved communication in turn results in a more proactive approach to overall technology strategy in the labs, and leads to improved productivity and decreased time to market.  When products can get to marker quicker the entire organization becomes more profitable, and what’s more fun than that?