Business intelligence and knowledge management: tools to personalize knowledge delivery

Information Outlook,  August, 2003  by Anne Walker,  Kathleen Millington

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Berlex Laboratories, an ethical pharmaceutical company headquartered in Montville, New Jersey, produces, develops, and markets specialized medicines, including radiopharmaceuticals, for diagnostic imaging, oncology, female health, cardiovascular disease, dermatology, and central nervous system disorders. Berlex is the U.S. affiliate of Schering AG, Germany, a global company based in Berlin whose history reaches back more than 130 years.

Berlex's Library and Information Center (LINC) supports the information management needs of the business and therapeutic units in Montville and Wayne, NJ. With a staff of two information managers and two paraprofessionals, the LInC supports all reference and literature searches as well as Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and regulatory activities. The LInC also processes invoices, supports global licensing for U.S materials, and produces two daily informational newsletters on pharmaceutical industry activities.

Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management

Knowledge management has been defined as "the methods and tools for capturing, storing, organizing, and making accessible knowledge and expertise within and across communities." And one of those tools is business intelligence. Knowing everything you can about your competition--from past achievements to future actions--helps your company compete successfully. The inclusion of business intelligence as part of knowledge management is commonplace in the day-to-day efforts of the corporate knowledge worker.

Capturing knowledge and information within the pharmaceutical industry is a significant operation for us in the LINC. Berlex Laboratories focuses on many different areas of medicine. As Berlex expanded, the LInC was finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of the many varied sources of information. Pieces of information from different sources were being tracked and stored in various places. It became apparent that we needed one integrated repository for our diverse forms of information. In the past, Berlex had initiated the InMagic[R] suite of database tools to organize library processes. With the company's information technology department stretched to capacity, we found that InMagic provided the functionality we desired, coup]ed with a user-friendly platform that allowed us to perform many of our own IT-related procedures.

With visions of an integrated knowledge management system in our future, we purchased InMagic's IntelliMagic[TM], tool to help our department index, organize, and store the various types of pharmaceutical business information we use.

The first step in developing such a tool is determining the focus of the effort. What areas in the vast pool of information are we going to cover? The answer depends on the resources available. Given our small staff, we decided to focus on generally available business information, both free and subscription-based, and to use IntelliMagic as a simple information repository. While we recognize that data-mining is a key component of business intelligence, we decided to forgo that aspect of our tool for the moment because of limited resources.

Our database is structured to pull information from licensed and public databases as an on-demand service, so the resulting information is as current as the database at that. point in time. For now, our system does not act as a data warehouse, storing archival information. We felt that our limited time would be best spent developing a product that would deliver a consolidated current snapshot.

Through the LINC, Berlex subscribes to several proprietary products and services, some of which require separate training and searching to obtain overlapping information. The benefit of IntelliMagic is that it provides a preformatted repository for different information formats. The product uses a canned search creator that takes the format of a query created by a specific database product and stores it, thus enabling a user to query that database with a simple keyword or two. Using this canned query creator, we can now integrate several types of information into one company profile. For example, we can create a complete company profile by combining information from the NDA (New Drug Application) Pipeline, a product of FDC Reports and the U.S. patent and Trademark Office (USPTO. gov); review articles and trial information from PubMed; news and stock information from NewsEdge; federal filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC.gov); and links to the company website and product websites themselves. Our offering, called the Business Intelligence Database, resides on our intranet and is open to all users who have the correct permissions. Naturally, the database is restricted to users who are covered under the licensing of the electronic resources used.

Each company profile in the Business Intelligence Database contains the same types of information, where appropriate. The most important aspect of this database is the preformed canned query. With this ability, we can set up the syntax for each query without having to worry about the content for each record. The content is updated as the site changes. This allows us to set up a large database with hundreds of records, without a great deal of hands-on updating. Not only is it easy for the LInC staff to set up and maintain, but our users know they are getting the most current information supplied by the products.