INC Research
Roadmap for Technology Investments
Jonathan Shough
Customer Focus
With increasing opportunities being presented to us through our rapid IT growth, we have become better equipped to examine our work processes. IT plays such an integral part of our overall work that we recognize its impact on our ability to disseminate information to our customers. A major focus for us has been to listen to what our customers are saying so that we can gauge exactly where our needs, solutions and focus should be. The ability to apply our technology solutions for each customer has resulted in more efficient clinical trials. Looking forward, we are examining how working in the cloud can help bolster an even higher level of customer delivery.
Organize Investments
Our commitment to patient safety and quality research remains of paramount importance. Making the appropriate investments in technology will help to drive better integration, collaboration and automation. We strive to deliver superior monitoring across all clinical operations and eliminate any complexities.
Partnering with Medidata Solutions
As a clinical research organization, our regulatory environment differs from that of other CIO’s, particularly when we partner with outside vendors. We have a very different set of rules under which we have to operate. As a result of our partnership with Medidata Solutions, we’ve recently had significant growth with our cloud capabilities. This partnership resulted in INC Research becoming the first CRO to achieve accreditation for the Medidata Clinical Cloud in June 2013.
Through this relationship, we can enable a full suite of cloud-based technologies in conjunction with our Trusted Process, a proprietary data-driven clinical trial management approach, allowing for greater data transparency and collaboration. Delivery of cost-efficient methods that optimize trials from design to database lock and give near real-time visibility to the data that are critical to the successful running of trials.
A New Viewpoint
INC Research recognizes that analytics must be at the forefront of our operational work to enhance the decision making process. This entails disseminating data to the appropriate people to ensure the discovery of comprehensive and accurate solutions.
One of the challenges, as we go global are the opportunities where redundant activities tend to creep in, it is important to eliminate those activities which are not value added
By enabling our constituents to access a single global interface, we can provide a horizontal viewpoint across the spectrum so that clinical decisions are better informed. This not only drives deeper analytics, it also creates a platform to make decisions more efficiently and maintain safety biometrics within clinical operations.
Globalizing Operations to Reduce Variability
Currently, the biggest IT challenge is time. From our perspective, the data we utilize may differ across regions outside of westernized culture. The obstacle here becomes how to drive high-quality actionable data at the right time. This remains an area of focus for us to ensure we deliver services that result in high-quality data delivered at the time users require. Leveraging our Trusted Process, we make sure accurate decisions are reached locally, regionally and globally.
Service Provider Model to Collaboration Model
As I stepped into the role of CIO, we set up a governance committee to examine the business practices across INC Research and to establish a collaboration model to help drive technology decisions that is fully visible and inclusive. IT is now working closely with our global business leaders to work toward refining and crafting our future IT investments. We feel strongly this will result in better educated decisions regarding our technology stack and will eliminate wasted effort and duplication.
Key Listening Skills
An essential starting point to any dialogue is the ability to listen. That has been the focus of our governance committee, so we can truly comprehend where the business actually wants to go and how technology can help to generate these goals. We take time to understand the importance of the front-end operational processes and how they impact the back-end technology processes. We are currently updating and optimizing many of our technologies that will better enable us to deliver on our commitments to customers.
