Previous Post: FirstDoc User Group 2011 – a look back at the conference – Part 1

In Part 1 of the FDUG 2011 series, I described the location of the meeting, and gave an overview of CSC’s plan and strategies. In Part 2, I’ll talk about the rest of the conference.

Going thin

After the break, two of the Pharma companies gave a presentation on a project that they were each involved with to upgrade their document management system.

I’m not at liberty to discuss the details, but it is obvious that the drivers in the pharmaceutical world are the same as in any other business. Namely,

• Try and get as much functionality out of a product without writing customized code.
• Aim to increase the useability of a solution
• Make use of “thin” technology – (Portals).

The business cases presented described how CSC technology was being used to allow these goals to be met.  Always interesting to see, as this is a common theme.

Partnership Program

In the session  CSC described their “Partner Program” plans.

CSC’s goal here is to “put more effort into Partnerships to increase their usefulness.”  That is, with a good network of “CSC Partners”, CSC can meet client requirements, be able to offer more, and be more responsive (i.e. have more resources available) .

Companies that partner with CSC will fall into of three areas: Technology; Sales; Solution. Each area has its own “model” and KPIs that need to be met to be able to retain their status. “Customer Satisfaction” being the most important.

The message was that CSC want to seriously lift their game here. This will include certification, KPIs, working with the Partners to bring over a “unified” message.

Certification

As mentioned, CSC will be offering a certification program.

This will be made up of 4-tiered capabilities (Installation, Configuration, Customization, and Architecture). CSC are looking at some type of “boot camp” experience where individuals attend a week long course for each capability. This will be followed by several weeks of “shadowing” on client projects.

The fact that CSC mention this, signals that they want to set a standard that people that partner with them will meet. Which is encouraging. The “certification” is for the individual (that is, it’s not transferable to other people at the Partnersite).

Curious to see how this one will pan out.

Total Regulatory Solution

In the keynote presentation, there was mention of CSC’s “Total Regulatory Solution”.

Jennifer Wemstrom (who flew over to this year’s European FDUG) presented CSC’s overview of their “Total Regulatory Solution”.

Underpinning this is CSC’s aim to provide the “Total Business Solution” that supports the creation, management and consumption of regulatory documentation in the Life Sciences industry.

In simple words, CSC have got all the tools (especially since their acquisition of ISI and their Publishing tools) to achieve this, but the tools are still disparate applications. CSC’s goal is that all these disparate systems will be unified. They will have a common interface, and a use a shared data model.

This is definitely the right move. In my years as a ECM specialist I have seen companies grow through the acquisition of other companies that offer a solution that compliments, or even enhances, the parent companies offerings. The next logical step is to integrate the applications that make up the suite so that the user is presented with a seamless “solution”.

At the same time CSC seem to be actively investigating offering more than just a suite of technical products. They have realised that they have a lot of skill and knowledge in this area, and are talking about Business Process Outsourcing, and offering their Total Regulatory Solution as a managed service. (This ties in with CSC’s goal to dive into the cloud.)

New Product Offerings

CSC realise that there are still a few “gaps” in their offering. They are busy with  three new products. These are all to do with the submission end of the process. It looks like CSC are really listening to their customers.

Business Process Outsourcing

In this area CSC have three offerings:

• Staff Augmentation – where CSC staff will work “side by side” with the customer;
• Tactical Outsourcing – where CSC will handle specific aspects of the regulatory process.
• Functional Outsourcing of regulatory activity.

As mentioned above, CSC definitely want to make good use of the skills & experience they have built up, and want to expand into offering services rather than just technology.

To back this up, CSC described how they will be tackling staff training (resource development). They have three levels which includes a sort of “orientation/induction” level, “core training” for regulatory activities, and then, “client specific training” which addresses the activities that a client has outsourced to CSC.

Managed Services

CSC have a series of Managed Service Models. These include the traditional models of “on premise” or “hosted” through to “As a service” which includes “Dedicated”, “Private Cloud”, and “Public Cloud”.  A flavor to suit all requirements.

FirstDocs 6.3

Bill Meier spent some time discussing the CSC’s latest version of FirstDoc (version 6.3) which include a large number of enhancements.

A few of the high points include the fact that this version will be certified on Linux.

…continued in Part 3

Next Post: FirstDoc User Group 2011 – a look back at the conference – Part 3

Related articles

• CSC Unveils New Machine-to-Machine Solution
• FirstDoc User Group 2011 – a look back at the conference – Part 2
• FirstDoc User Group 2011 – a look back at the conference – Part 4
• FirstDoc User Group 2011 – a lookback at the conference – Part 1
• FDUG – Europe – I have arrived.
• FirstDoc User Group – Vienna

Previous Post: FDUG – Europe – Review of the Agenda

In this post I discuss the recently held 2011 FirstDoc User Group conference. Because there was so much content I am doing this in multiple posts.

Location and Venue

As described in my earlier post, this year’s FDUG was held in Vienna. At the end of each FDUG Conference , the organizers ask the attendees where they would like the next one to be held. Vienna came up on the list two years ago as a favourite, and clearly made its way to the top of the list. Not a bad choice.

The conference was held at the Marriott Hotel. The conference rooms were great, and the catering was superb. The breakfast available at the beginning of each day was an excellent idea!

Attendees

Pharma Customers

There was a lot of people at this years user group. There were 53 attendees, representing 21 of CSC’s 47 Pharma customers.

CSC Team

• Marty Magazzolo – Global Practice Director, ECCM Life Sciences
• Paul Attridge – Head of Life Sciences ECCM Product Development
• Jennifer Wemstrom – Director, Regulatory Solutions
• Bill Meier – FirstDoc Product Manager
• Franciska Darmer – Life Sciences Solution Specialist
• Christopher Langebner – Senior Account Executive
• Steve Scrace – Senior Account Executive
• Pablo Santiago – Manager, CSC Spain
• Rober Svanetti – Life Sciences Manager, CSC Italy
• Tobia Griessel – Account Executive, CSC Germany

Sessions

In my last FDUG post I talked about the proposed agenda. Fortunately there weren’t many changes.

You can view the agenda here.

KeyNote & Strategy Update

After a warm welcome by Bill Meier,  the Conference kicked off with the KeyNote.

Marty Magazzolo, the Global Practice Director, took to the stage and gave an update on CSC’s strategy, as well as describing a little bit of the original goal of their purchase of FCG. Namely, it was to “be more inline with their customers’ business needs than rather being a pure IT vendor” (Even though in quotes, the previous statement is, most likely not exact, but gets the same message across.)

Business – CSC nows considers itself a “Global Technology and Business Services Company”, and operates in three lines of business:

• Business Solutions & Services
• Managed Services Sector
• North American Public Sector

Software Strategy – With it’s recent acquisition of ISI, CSC now has a range of products that allow it to offer “Total Business Solutions”.

In fact their Mission Statement is:

Provide end to end business solutions for processes involving the creation, review, approval, consumption & exchange of regulated and mission critical documents and content within a Life Sciences organization

To achieve this, CSC have created several “Total” solutions – These include one for Regulatory, one for Clinical, and one for Quality. These played a large role in this year’s conference.

At the same time, CSC admitted that the solutions are still made up of disparate systems. The goals for the future are to streamline them so that they use a common interface, a common database structure, and work together seamlessly.

Business Process Outsourcing – CSC feel that they can offer the expertise necessary to handle customer’s regulatory, and other, requirements. A benefit of this outsourcing model is that “skills are sharpened and rotated” allowing their (CSC’s) staff to gain skills in a wide area, and these resources can then be called upon, when necessary, for specific tasks. The cost savings, CSC claim, are seen when you compare to having specialist skills in-house full-time.

Cloud – Paul Attridge said “Everyone’s got a cloud”, and  CSC are also “clouding up” and are looking at offering both private and public cloud service models.

System Integration – CSC’s message was that they intend to create better integration with other products. The goal is to be able to offer solutions to their customers that match the “real world” situation. Even if the solution requires integrating with other ECM related products (and is achieved through partnerships).

CSC are also trying to keeping an eye on the progress of the SAFE-BioPharma® Digital Identity and Signature Standard, to determine whether they will need to offer suitable integration capabilities.

User Interface – CSC add FirstDoc functionality to EMC’s “fat” client for Documentum – WebTop. EMC have announced WebTop is being phased out after Version 7 of Documentum. CSC are working to ensure that their SharePoint web part technology (SPX) will have the same features as offered by WebTop.  At the same time CSC will be investing in creating an interface using EMC’s  rapid application development technology, xCP.  (In fact, EMC have asked CSC to help ensure that version 2.1 of xCP will provide complete content management capabilities.)

This brought us to the end of the Keynote and Strategy session. Before the coffee break Bill Meier shared with us an interesting article he had read over  the effects of coffee – caffeine increase alertness in woman, but, in men, there is a drop in performance and confidence. (This link describes a little of what Bill was talking about).

I will cover the other sessions in a later post.

Next post: FirstDoc User Group 2011 – a look back at the conference – Part 2

Related articles

• FDUG – Europe – I have arrived. (markjowen.com)
• FirstDoc User Group – Vienna (markjowen.com)