SOA Speeds Up Data Delivery Process

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December 07, 2007

SOA Speeds Up Data Delivery Process

Let's face it -- say what you want about the pharmaceutical industry -- researching and creating new drugs costs a bundle of money, sometimes billions of dollars.

If you're running a company that has to put up megadollars before a new product can be rolled out, there's a lot of pressure to make the right decisions up front. You need all the information you can get, fast.

Such is the challenge described in a new article by Daniel Eng, manager at Pfizer Global Research and Development. "At Pfizer Global R&D where the company's drug discovery takes place, research scientists and managers require vast amounts of up-to-the-minute information on lab results, submission status, and project schedules to move new research forward quickly. Management must constantly analyze the entire portfolio of new medicines in discovery to look for opportunities, trends, and areas where attention is needed. Researchers and managers strive to bring together the best in ideas, practices, policies as well as the use of information."

Eng says the company turned to a SOA-based strategy to bring data together for analysis in the drug discovery process. The end result was faster delivery of data through "new real-time portals and composite applications that rely heavily on existing data sourced from multiple systems from across the enterprise."

Pfizer appears to be well ahead of the curve in bringing the two disciplines of SOA and data management together. In November, I posted some details about Pfizer's leveraging of master data management (MDM) in combination with SOA to bring together data assets from across its global enterprise into a single, centralized data definition. (Explained by Martin Brodbeck, executive director for strategic architecture at Pfizer at the InfoWorld Executive Forum.)

Eng says that prior to service-orienting this process, delivering such data to researchers and managers "has been one of our biggest bottlenecks, adding months and cost to our project timelines." As part of the new drug discovery process, Eng relates, "managers must pull data from sources such as packaged applications, historical data from data warehouses, document repositories, and custom systems. Each source has its own access mechanisms, syntax, and security. Few are structured properly for consumption, let alone reuse. These combined factors slow down new application development projects."

Eng's team was challenged with helping senior management, project team leaders, business analysts, and research scientists across Pfizer's R&D and commercial business units to be able to continuously evaluate the company's portfolio of discovery projects and drugs in development.

The solution was to deploy a portal that can be used across the enterprise that provides access to all pertinent data. Pfizer employs SOA approaches behind the portal environment "to increase reuse of existing components, save development time, and cut costs. So, we strive to use SOA methods and technologies whenever possible," Eng explains.

"We've found that SOA helps break down silo-type data gathering and integration processes by standardizing how data is promoted and reused," Eng relates. The ability to virtualize and abstract via data services helps groups to easily understand and consume data confidently, reliably, and quickly without having to hunt for these sources or rely on manual processes for gathering and integrating them."

Posted by joemckendrick in Data Management | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us