Emanuele Quintarelli's Library tagged pharma →  View Popular

Dr. Thierry Barsalou was on the same panel. Thierry is Chief Information Officer at Ipsen.
He is also in charge of the Competitive Intelligence at Ipsen. Ipsen is
a global pharmaceutical company, with headquarters in Paris France.

Thierry and his team have implemented a very powerful internal Competitive Intelligence system based on Traction Software. Traction makes a tool that is part blog and part Wiki.

Thierry has had tremendous success, with truly substantial internal readership.

He provided some basic, and very useful, tips on how to achieve similar success.

• Start first with the business problem. Thierry’s object was simply
  to get better Competitive Intelligence. The CEO wanted the whole
  company to be aware of what their competitors where doing on a real
  time basis. Thierry and the CEO also wanted the whole team to be aware
  of all the latest changes in rules and regulations affecting the
  markets for the drugs they produce. In addition, the whole team needed
  to be kept up to date on the latest relevant medical research. Thierry
  and the CEO realized that they needed to tap the whole company as a
  source for this information. The information came from conferences,
  reports, personal contacts, and other unexpected sources. Clearly, it
  made sense to tap the whole team as an information gathering resource.
• Create a culture of sharing. In other words, foster a culture of reciprocal altruism.
• Create a contribution culture.
• Start slow; then let it grow. I hear this advice again and again for people setting up Web Office systems.
• Taxonomy was important. I’ve argued against an imposed
  taxonomy. Thierry does not agree. In Pharma, there is good reason for
  imposing a taxonomy. It is important to keep definitions consistent. I
  would still argue for a balanced approach, with some planned taxonomy
  and some method for the team to grow and evolve that taxonomy. However,
  clearly there are no hard and fast rules that apply universally to all
  web office deployments.
• Security and enterprise class features, such as an audit
  trail are critical components of their deployment. This is a challenge
  that I am struggling with in the deployment I am building for my firm.
• Integration into existing tools is critical. To ease the
  transition to Web Office, it is important to provide people with
  multiple ways of getting at information within the system. Thierry
  found that they needed to generate a summary Competitive Intelligence
  email that is sent out as a daily Digest. This drove people to the site.
• Thierry recommends Traction.