Some pharmaceutical companies are using SharePoint instead of Documentum as their enterprise platform for managing “controlled documents”. Controlled documents comprise the content associated with a life sciences company’s most important and most regulated processes. I believe that this trend could represent one of the most significant changes in pharma ECM. It could also serve as a “proof of concept” for other industries and applications with complex and highly regulated content.
This post explains what’s going on and recommends what you should do about it.
Since the inception of MOSS 2007, pharmas have been using SharePoint for basic “uncontrolled” document management, collaboration, and shared drive replacement. More recently, some pharmas have tried to use SharePoint as the front end to the more traditional and entrenched ECM repositories for controlled documents. In most cases, the “traditional and entrenched” repositories meant Documentum; sometimes Open Text or a few others. Typically, the pharmas learned that the necessary integration is more difficult than they originally thought.
Over the past several years we’ve helped several pharmas consolidate and rationalize their ECM portfolios. For uncontrolled processes and documents, this has usually involved consolidating down to SharePoint for management of uncontrolled documents (as described above). For controlled processes and documents, we typically helped them move to a smaller number of applications, usually provided as modules in (hopefully) a single pharma application suite provided by a single vendor. The application suite would almost always use Documentum as its ECM platform. So the target future state for most of our pharma clients was to consolidate management of uncontrolled documents on SharePoint, and to target management of their controlled documents on a single application suite based on a single ECM platform. This usually meant various CSC FirstDoc modules for research and development, submission, and GCP/GMP/GLP documents, all sitting on a Documentum platform.
But now some of our pharma clients are evaluating whether to go to a single platform for all their documents – both uncontrolled and controlled. The next 2 years are an inflection point, and will probably be the beginning of a major shift in the document management platform profile for the pharma industry. Here’s how it may happen:
- Almost all the pharmas we know have one or more document management applications coming up for upgrade or replacement. This means that these pharmas are going to be making an application and thus a platform choice in the next year or so.
- But the platform they choose for that application (Documentum or SharePoint) will probably be the one they select for the next application they replace. And so on.
- Since pharma application suites and platforms have a lifespan in the organization of 7 or more years, the platform choices made in the next couple of years will become many organizations’ enterprise standard for at least 7 years. As these pharmas are working out their portfolio consolidation roadmaps, they are thinking in terms of the long haul. Will the platform choices made in 2012 still be viable in 2016, 2019, and beyond?
As the pharmas plan their platform roadmap, there’s really only a small set of options to consider – only two vendors and three pharma application suites:
- CSC FirstDoc uses Documentum
- CSC FirstPoint uses SharePoint (same vendor, different suite and platform)
- NextDocs uses SharePoint
Moving to SharePoint as a platform would be a nonstarter if pharmas couldn’t be assured that FirstPoint or NextDocs could adequately perform as soon as they were put into production this year or the next. But that’s what’s so interesting about the SharePoint option. It’s a plausible option because actual pharmas have begun implementing SharePoint as a platform, starting first with MOSS 2007, and now with SharePoint 2010. In addition, FirstPoint and NextDocs have also gone through several iterations, which is both good (it indicates some maturity) and bad (at least some of those iterations were because they were still trying to get it right).
What should you do if you’re a pharma at this inflection point? We recommend the following:
1) At a minimum, consider a two-platform consolidation strategy. Over the next few years this approach would bring you to SharePoint for management of uncontrolled documents, a single application suite for management of controlled documents (probably CSC FirsDoc), and a single platform for controlled DM (Documentum).
2) But also consider a one-platform consolidation strategy. This would bring you to SharePoint for management of uncontrolled documents, and either FirstPoint or NextDocs for management of controlled documents – both based on SharePoint.
3) Do a formal empirical evaluation of the three solution options at your organization. Do a bakeoff between FirstDoc/Documentum, FirstPoint/SharePoint, and NextDocs/SharePoint. It will require some time and resources, but the stakes are high enough to justify it. In my next post on this topic, I will explain exactly how to conduct such an evaluation.