SLA
Pharmaceutical & Health Technology Division
The Future of the Information Professional
Dr. Mark Burfoot
April 16th 2013
What to expect
 The Landscape of Pharma today
 What’s changing and how that impacts the information
profession
• Working styles
• Emerging models
• Area of changing focus
• Big Data
 What does it mean for the information professional
 Building the Next Generation
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The environment is not so bleak…..
But we still have our challenges..
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Type of change
 Working styles
• Mobility
• Perceptions/expectations
 Emerging business models
• Open Innovation
• New collaborative styles
 New markets
 Changing focus
 Big Data
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Working Styles
 Mobility
• Access at work is critical
for many job roles
• Access on-the-go is
growing in importance
 Perception
• If I can access non-work
content easily I should
be able to do this for
work content
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• Security should be
seamless
Business Models
Beach Incubator
 Open Innovation
• Increased challenge of
sharing content with
academic environment
 Technology changes
• Multiple platforms
• More visual needs
• Real time access
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New Markets, new information
 Healthcare informatics
• Patient records to social
media
 Geography
• R&D emerging in new
places
 Cultural challenges
• Leads to different
expectations
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Change in focus
 From blockbuster
 Orphan Drugs
 Niche opportunities
 New Patient populations
 Healthcare
 Regen medicine
 New technologies
 Big Data
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Pausing on Big Data
 What is it?
 Healthcare data
 Next Gen Sequence
 Consortiums pooling
resources and data
 Other
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Big Data has generated initiatives in Biomedical
Research
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Will more data improve quality?
A key concern is still quality!
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The problem of the informatician and a challenge
for the information scientist
 Quality is always key
 Refining the deluge to the
interpretable solution avoid the trap
 Engineering the
information
 Expanding our toolsets
 Developing the knowledge
worker everywhere
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So how about today
What’s expected and how to adapt
 Still a strong need for information
• Not so much the book library
• But....
- Simple access
- Portals
- Integration with tools and processes
• Still need the one-stop-shop approach
• The right information when needed
• Enabling the user
- Specific domains of expertise, clinical, pharmacology, biological……
- Help, training, education
• Biggest area of need
» How to use and take advantage of what we have
» How to best integrate our solutions
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Expanding/developing service means expanding
the informed users not a bigger department
 Expand the super users to
extend your capability
 Consider not only what is
licensed or external
• Internal data is key for decisions
• People need easy access to both
 Expand your channels for
education
• Media variety
• On demand access
• Repeatable solutions
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We need to cope with a variety of work styles
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Tools need to be flexible
For Information professionals and end users
 Mobile views
 Analysis views
 Indexed feeds to be
consumed and
integrated
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New Skills and new expectations
 The Professional over the next 5 years
• Comfortable with IT
• Able to build solutions in basic tools.
- Today SharePoint, Spotfire, how to use an API
 As IT professionals work to integrate, store, provide more
analysis tools…..
• Information professionals have to lead the way with how to maximize
value with what we are generating
• Become more integrated with the biomedical issues and problems to
seek solutions
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But there will be diversity
 Those that can maximize
learning and education will be
critical to our success
 Those that can engineer
solutions will be pioneers
 More focused teams to deal
with key topics
 Move the simple stuff out
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And our next generation of information professionals?
 The curricula of
information and knowledge
management
 The baseline of
Information Technology
skills
 The ability to connect to
pharma’s needs more
proactively
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The future worker’s needs will be demanding and constant!
Questions?
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