Big Data holds promise for helping pharma boost efficiencies, but the business case for new analytic techniques, in many cases, is still being written. How do you justify budgeting for data-management technologies?
Anne Stroup
Managing Director
True Health + Wellness, a Harte-Hanks Company
Resource allocation to gain benefits from big data is an organizational commitment. Harnessing the data is only a step in leveraging its value. Turning data into insights that drive behavioral change is the value achieved when analytics and creativity work together.
From a promotional perspective, we look for insights that help us understand the audience. By expanding the segmentation model and market research scope while integrating engagement metrics, we gain the insights that inspire a dialogue between a brand and its customers.
You need data to understand your target audiences’ attitudes, behavior, and preference trends. Relevancy to the individual lets a brand achieve sales growth and communication efficiencies, and that’s how you justify the budget.
Jeff Catteau
Practice Lead,
Knowledgement
We are seeing mundane uses of data sciences deliver significant value and direct benefit. Whether using Hadoop as a pushdown target to offline operational history or using unstructured data mining to extract opportunities for improvement from the myriad of IT systems logs and business interaction notes from ERP and CRM systems, companies are creating millions to tens of millions of dollars of benefit from these approaches. Once perfected and directed at top-line opportunities and game changers, research shows that companies who embrace a culture of decisions from informed insight and who become extroverted innovators will realize the value from investments in massive analytics. In our industry, this will improve peoples’ lives through better, safer therapies. How can we justify not doing it?
John Busalacchi
Senior Principal,
IMS Health
Marketing, Sales, Compliance & R&D all have the potential to benefit from the derived insights of big data. The challenge is to identify which mountains of data to mine and which costs are appropriate. Pharmaceutical companies should look to service and data providers who have the data, infrastructure and services to integrate and mine the data and demonstrate the potential yields in targeted areas). Once the right mountain and yield is demonstrated, the business case may be used to operationalize this data within the company and continually measure its worth. The costs may be reduced through the use of hosted/cloud-based services for master data management and analytics with the vendor providing information management as a service and the client using the outputs for improved value.
Dave Duplay
Founder and President,
MedTera
According to some stats, it is estimated that 2.6 exabytes of data is created daily and over 85% of all data was created in the last two years. With that growing volume, the challenge is not generating or gathering data, it’s answering the question of what to do with the data. The pharmaceutical industry winners will be companies who make the investment to apply advanced analytics to big data and glean insights about their customers. These insights can be used to build stronger relationships and foster ongoing patient engagement. Big Data needs to come out of the clinical closet and be applied to the commercialization function in pharma.
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From the February 01, 2013 Issue of MM+M - Medical Marketing and Media
