CCC recently sat down with Doreen P. Alberts, a consultant with over 30 years of drug development experience, for a discussion on how smaller life science companies can improve the way their employees search for and utilize the scientific content that helps power their innovation. You can watch the full conversation here.
What considerations do you make when it comes to choosing a vendor to partner with on document delivery, and what makes a vendor stand out to you?
Innovation is at the heart of every successful company. When I think of literature management partners that stand out, I think of companies who focus on service innovation.
I am looking for creative vendors that I can partner with to help me find new ways to improve user experience. I consider how vendors use new technologies to provide improved customer service 24/7. Is semantic searching available within their system? Are they using ontologies to improve the quality of answer sets when I look for documents or articles?
Another important question — does the vendor offer post-search analysis? If you’re a scientist searching for content, you could get hundreds of results from one query. Most people will look through the top 50, maybe top 100 results, but what about the rest? A vendor that can analyze these search results and provide helpful information can really stand out, especially if they can help scientists identify key opinion leaders, trends, hot topics, competitor presence, and who is publishing in a given area. Having information like this can help scientists narrow down their search and prioritize what articles are important to read and therefore need to be purchased.
There are hundreds of other use cases on how this post-search data can be utilized, but ultimately the graphics and other information a vendor provides are only as good as the data sources that it identifies and includes in its analysis. Data is the fuel that powers technologies like natural language processing and machine learning. Scientists want to be able to search and analyze data from multiple diverse sources instead of having to do it one source at a time.
Are there any specific vendor considerations you make when working with smaller life science companies?
In my experience, smaller companies must account for the ever-present need to conserve their resources. However, they must show success in a short time so that they can raise more funding.
To be competitive, I want the small companies I work with to have access to the same resources that bigger companies do. I don’t want them to go without because of limited information resources budget.
That said, I look for vendors who can offer special pricing for small, emerging companies, and I also look for fixed corporate pricing versus per-user pricing. If a smaller company has 10–20 users, the per-seat payment model might be manageable at the start, but as the company grows, this per-user spend model could double or triple.
In your experience, if a company does employ a document delivery system, will their employees actually adopt it and use it to search for scientific content?
I’ll answer this question by posing a few other questions. What is the business need the new solution is going to solve? Do all the stakeholders involved fully understand what improvements are needed over existing tools?
I like to think of this from the employee’s perspective — if I am asked to change my process and use a new document delivery system, what’s in it for me? A company must be sure they can answer this question and communicate the answer effectively so its measure of success aligns with user expectations.
Once you implement the new system, ensure that you communicate with users regularly. Provide ample training opportunities to educate them and help them get comfortable navigating the product.
What is the most important takeaway you hope readers will remember from this discussion?
I think it’s vital for readers to keep in mind that when they are looking for a vendor, they should be searching for one who can both meet their needs now and can also grow with them, whatever size their company might be at the start.
Learn more about CCC’s solutions for small and emerging life sciences companies.