Sure path to R&D failure:  Conflation of IT with information science in the pharmaceutical industry

 

This is a case example of sociotechnical issues regarding lab scientists and research IT, observed by a medical informaticist in the pharmaceutical industry, that impaired research scientists' ability to perform drug research and development (R&D). A primary factor was a pervasive, narrow focus on information technology and empowerment of technologists to make decisions that should have been made by the scientists themselves, rather than a focus on information science (and perhaps common sense) and scientist control of informational resources essential to their creativity and productivity. Numerous issues analogous to provider sector issues that impair successful clinical IT implementation are described.

A medical informatics specialist was called for an interview with a large pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) organization whose scientific research libraries director was retiring.  The hiring manager for the role, a Senior Director of Information Resources overseeing public scientific information available to the world community (from publishers, vendors, aggregators etc.) as well as the company’s proprietary scientific information had heard of medical informatics.  This Senior Director had been a pharmaceutical research chemist and had excellent experience and competence in information science-related issues.

 

The Senior Director found early work the informaticist had conducted in information indexing strategies very interesting, and potentially relevant towards better “targeting” scientific information delivery to research lab scientists.  Despite the informaticist’s lack of a formal library science degree and library operations experience, the hiring manager felt the informaticist’s prior management experience in challenging clinical and hospital environments, and the strong connection between medical informatics and the informational needs of pharma R&D, made the informaticist a good fit for the role.

 

The informaticist was encouraged by this enlightened view, the view that ability and experience in closely related domains can outweigh specific “formal” credentials at mid management levels.  Paradoxically, such accommodation of those without exacting domain credentials is usually only done at the very highest levels of management, where even near-complete lack of domain experience is often highly accommodated (e.g., one pharma’s hiring of its new CEO.  Prior to the pharma CEO position, this person served as chairman and chief executive officer of Boston Market Corporation, formerly Boston Chicken, a division of fast food chain McDonald's, a company not highly related to biomedical R&D and the pharmaceutical industry.  See Pharma brings life to the metaphor “If you've run McDonald's, you can run anything” for more on this phenomenon.

 

During interviews, the hiring manager expressed the hope that the informaticist could “reinvigorate” an area described as highly under funded and undervalued by the senior executives overseeing the scientific information and research computing functions, and convince the VP of Research IT, to whom this area reported, to increase budget and staffing.

 

The informaticist was concerned about this explanation.  In addition, the informaticist was highly concerned that the reporting structures were illogical, with the science libraries (a user of IT, not a provider of IT) reporting to the VP of research IT.  This VP oversaw not just research IT but all research scientific information assets of the company, yet had no background in biomedicine or biomedical research.  The VP’s background was in secondary school math, post baccalaureate computer science and the IT software and hardware business. 

 

The science libraries reported to this individual out of custom and tradition, based on a rather outdated, 1970’s-ish notion that “if it’s information, the computer people do it.”  This surprised and disappointed the informaticist.  The informaticist met the VP at interview and was not impressed with the VP’s seemingly narrow focus on metrics and cost issues and lack of biomedical domain knowledge.  Yet, the informaticist took the position as libraries director hoping to escape the informational backwaters of hospitals for the “information intensive” environment of pharmaceutical R&D.  The informaticist reasoned that with the company’s reputation for research excellence and the doctorate-level background of its CIO (although the CIO’s doctorate was in a physics-related area, not biomedicine), overall attitudes about informatics must be far more progressive than in the typical resource-strained hospital.  Nonetheless, the informaticist was quite concerned there might be significant conceptual problems lurking within regarding information science.

 

The informaticist’s concerns proved correct from the very beginning of the new role.  The library staff related the scientists were indeed underserved, but the library staff felt severely undervalued, were demoralized and were afraid to speak out for fear of their jobs.  They also strongly and openly doubted the informaticist could do anything about the problems; this comment came from, among others, a librarian who’d been with the company for decades and had witnessed a decline in its attitudes about libraries and information science in favor of information technologists.

 

The informaticist embarked on new projects and expanded existing projects designed to significantly improve informational support for drug R&D, including web-based training of scientists in scientific information retrieval, a highly customized alerting system based on individual needs with links to fulltext, a system to track and expedite requests for custom, comprehensive world science literature searching, and a major enterprise analysis designed to identify and remediate gaps in information provision to the research labs.

 

The informaticist was wrong thinking the IT environment here would be more enlightened than in hospitals.  It became apparent that the research computing organization supporting drug R&D conflated information technology with information science (i.e., believed that a degree in computer science, information systems or software engineering automatically conferred expertise in information science, and that a biomedical or information science background was unnecessary for leadership roles in the information organization) to a degree clearly paralleled in the delivery sector.  This was due primarily to analogous false assumptions, misconceptions, underestimations, an utter lack of understanding of social informatics issues, and scarcity of biomedical domain expertise in the leadership - with similar results on organizational success.   This conflation by senior management led to decisions that effectively gave the IT department significant power over research scientists, through control of the informatics tools they had available. 

 

The informaticist also noted suboptimal IT-scientist relations that closely paralleled the IT-clinician relationship problems in hospitals. 

 

For example, several R&D VP’s, themselves renowned scientists, expressed concern that they had no idea what the research computing division actually did, had no confidence in the computer people to lead projects affecting R&D, and that the Research IT divisional web site was disorganized and uninformative.  The informaticist was assigned the task of remediating the research computing website.  On the basis of the R&D leadership’s observations, the informaticist collected information about what each group in research computing did, what specific expertise its personnel had, and specific projects each group had completed successfully.  A clean, simple, well-organized, easily searchable website with this information was prototyped. 

 

However, IT personnel in the other research computing groups felt the content too “bland” and not a good “marketing effort.”   They hijacked the effort with little resistance (the informaticist was new and did not want to get into political battles early in his tenure) and created a flashier but somewhat disorganized, discombobulated website with little rhyme or reason to informational structure, link consistency, etc.  The functional information about each group created by the informaticist and assistants was “buried” in a rather inconspicuous link in the “new” page.  The result was that the R&D VP’s still complained that they had little real idea of what the Research Computing group did.

 

This was the least of the informaticist’s problems, however. When time came for employee evaluations, a process done by rating appropriate 'skills' on a grid of 'skill sets', the informaticist discovered that there were no defined skillsets particular to LIS (library information science) nor any relevant to medical informatics in the research IT division. The 'skill sets' were highly technology-focused, an absurdity and, in effect, discriminatory gap since they had been in use for some time to rate employees in this department. Numerous staff complained about the demoralizing situation this created, e.g., regarding promotions. IT staff were promoted but information science specialists were left behind, they stated. The informaticist set out to correct this unfortunate oversight, despite the bureacratic processes involved in doing do, but considered this gap symptomatic of a wider information-issues 'disease.' 

Most importantly, the informaticist had started fielding complaints from the research labs’ scientific leaders that vital cheminformatics and other informational tools were being rationed to a bit over a hundred scientists out of a worldwide population of thousands, to save a few million dollars annually (out of a research budget orders of magnitude larger).   The senior scientific leaders deemed these tools not frills, not just important, but absolutely critical to new drug discovery.  Due to patent time limitations on brand-name drugs and the emergence of low-cost generics once a patent expired, new drug discovery and a robust “pipeline” of new drugs under testing is indeed the lifeblood of any pharmaceutical company.  Via publicly available information, the informaticist discovered that major competing pharmas had nearly an order of magnitude the number of scientists with access to these tools.

 

The informaticist heard rumors that some scientists were resorting to using friends and relatives’ accounts for these services at various universities where the relatives were enrolled and who, as students, had free access for educational purposes.  The use of others’ academic accounts represented a severe contractual violation for both the universities and the pharma and the informaticist was quite concerned about these rumors.

 

Indeed, after a detailed resource gaps investigation, the informaticist found the gaps in provision of tools such as eJournal full text, CAS SciFinder, Beilstein Crossfire, and others approached $4 million annually.  As a result, the informaticist put together a detailed business case for increasing the library operational budget to end the rationing.  The informaticist stated three levels of remediation:  $1.5 million annually would be the bare “urgent” minimum to alleviate the most severe rationing, $2.5 million would be intermediate, and $4 million would be ideal.

 

As part of the business case, the informaticist included testimonials from senior scientific leaders:

 

VP, Medicinal Chemistry:  “This is a note to follow up on our previous discussions regarding desktop access to cheminformatics tools such as CrossFire and SciFinder.  These applications are invaluable to the productivity of medicinal chemists in my department.  CrossFire, in particular, is highly useful as the primary source for chemical information.  Most new Ph.D. chemists whom we recruit are accustomed to using these tools to facilitate their research, and in fact, it is embarrassing that I have eight new Ph.D.'s who have arrived beginning last August who still do not have desktop access to CrossFire or SciFinder.  I cannot overemphasize the value of having these tools accessible to chemists at their desktop, and I would urge you to expedite their deployment as quickly as possible. 

 

Executive Director, Medicinal Chemistry:  A lot of researchers will be happy campers. Thank you for your efforts in bringing the Research Labs into the 21st century. 

 

Sr. VP, Basic Research:   I understand that you are in the final throes of negotiating a contract that will allow all of our scientists unlimited access to CrossFire. I just want to let you know that I think this is a great step forward. While I recognized that the additional cost will be significant, especially in a time of limited resource availability, CrossFire is worth it. Furthermore, at a time when essentially all of our doctoral-level hires are coming from academic settings where they had unlimited access to this tool, I have been concerned that our previously more restricted policy could hurt us in the heated competition to attract new talent to our Research Labs. Thanks for taking on this important initiative.

 

VP, Basic Chemistry:   We are in support of this plan to place CrossFire on the desktops of our scientists.  The ability to do these types of searches quickly and efficiently is an important feature of our day to day work.

 

This was a seeming slam-dunk.  However, “seeming” was the operative word.

 

Almost predictably, and after several rounds of proposal revision based on other managers’ knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of the VP regarding format and semantics), the VP of Research IT grudgingly approved only the minimum amount of $1.5 million, despite times being relatively good and the company spending hundreds of millions annually on advertising alone.  The $1.5 million minimal funds enabled only limited improvement in rationing, but at least there was a doubling of scientist access to the most crucial drug discovery informatics tools.  (Some would say that “twice nothing is still nothing”, the informaticist thought privately.)

 

The fact that the information assets were soft (e.g., subscription) and not “tangible” (i.e., as servers or other hardware would be), and that ROI was hard to calculate (the return perhaps not being seen for ten or fifteen years due to the great length of time from compound discovery to actual sales) seemed to play a role in the reluctance to invest further.  The VP also seemed to resent that these information assets were so expensive, which the informaticist explained had to do with the great deal of “value add” provided by the aggregators and vendors in terms of archiving, indexing and retrieval, among other factors, that are non-trivial.  The irony here, of course, is that this resentment was coming from a senior industry executive in pharma, whose pricing structures and massive margins were constantly under attack.

 

The ROI question also remained front and center despite the most critical issue being cost of lost opportunity, a concept the VP of Research IT seemed unwilling or unable to fully grasp.  Put more simply, the old adage “if you want to make a sale, you have to have the merchandise” applies.  In pharma this means that aggressive, long-term thinking about new product development -- as well as risk-taking -- are essential.  The informaticist felt that the unwillingness to invest a few million dollars annually for the finest discovery informatics tools out of an annual budget in the billions of dollars represented rather risk-adverse, mission hostile behavior to the point of being Milquetoast:

 

Wikipedia:  Caspar Milquetoast was a comic strip character created by Harold Webster in 1924 for his comic strip The Timid Soul, published in the New York World. From this character the term "milquetoast" has come to mean "weak and ineffectual." Webster continued to produce the comic strip until his death in 1952, after which his assistant Herb Roth carried it on for another year. The name is a deliberate misspelling of the name of a bland and fairly inoffensive food, milk toast.

 

The informaticist also wondered privately who, exactly, did the VP of Research IT work for – the company or its competition …

 

The Sr. Director of Information Resources who hired the informaticist had enough.  That person took a position in another company department, removed from the control of the VP of Research IT.  An internal replacement was appointed, one of the informaticist’s peers who had a library degree and strong biomedical information management background (who later resigned as well out of frustration at dealing with the VP of Research IT and non-biomedical, information science-naïve IT personnel, see below).

 

The heir apparent who was going to take over the research laboratories (thousands of employees) when its incumbent president reached retirement age also quit unexpectedly and left for a biotech.  A new successor was brought in from academia, someone who was scientifically brilliant but had only managed a small lab in an academic setting.  Further, while the incumbent research labs president was a voracious “consumer” of biomedical literature and made frequent requests for articles from the science libraries, the informaticist noted that the new heir apparent neither visited the library facilities to become familiar with them (even after invitation) nor made many requests for articles.  While this new person was understandably busy learning the organization, this difference was of great concern to the informaticist.

 

One of the informaticist’s peers, a director-level, competent computer professional managing a critical area of research IT, came to the informaticist nearly in tears in the parking lot after a meeting one afternoon.  He knew the informaticist was a physician and sought advice on his depression and that of his staff.  He explained that three people were basically doing the work of ten in his department due to corporate tightfistedness regarding staffing levels (“head count”).  This in a company with a multibillion dollar budget added to the informaticist’s concerns.

 

The informaticist was assigned a role in the research IT “talent management” (recruiting) committee.  Frequent recommendations that medical informatics cross-disciplinary expertise could be of significant value to the research IT activities fell on deaf ears.  The informaticist felt as if he were speaking Greek to the committee.

 

Going from bad to worse, the informaticist was at a research labs Executive Committee meeting to give a presentation on webcasting of scientific lectures from major universities to enrich the scientists’ knowledge base, and witnessed a true spectacle of information science ignorance and naïveté.  The new head of the research labs, a person with no corporate experience brought in from academia, demanded of the CIO the capability to instantly retrieve any business or scientific document in the terabytes of corporate information systems available.  The CIO tried to explain that to provide such a capability would require building an informatics infrastructure (e.g., a corporate-wide, comprehensive controlled vocabulary and ontology, a system to index documents, specialized retrieval tools, etc.) and that significant time and resources would be needed to accomplish these tasks.  The informaticist, having done research in information retrieval (IR) and knowing the efforts that went into tools such as PubMed, the UMLS, etc. thought the CIO’s response quite reasonable.

 

The research labs Executive Committee would have none of this.  They derided the CIO’s responses and wondered aloud in rather uncomplimentary tones why the CIO could not simply give them the “Google experience.”  It was as if these scientists thought issues in information science when dealing with contextual search and retrieval of terabytes of heterogeneous data and documents was bunk, or trivial, or magic of some sort.  There “syndrome of inappropriate overconfidence in computers” was palpable.  The CIO was insulted by the attacks and stated outright that if the Executive Committee did not let him do his job properly, he would leave.  The informaticist was taken aback by the attack on a competent CIO by senior executives and biomedical scientists, who clearly appeared to be information science dilettantes (this was appalling in itself).

 

This CIO indeed resigned just a few days later, and took a position at a biotech. 

 

The company executives named the VP of Research IT as acting CIO of the entire company.  The executives promised to replace the departed CIO with someone with biomedical expertise (more on how they reneged on that promise later). 

 

The informaticist found it exasperating that frequent justifications to the VP of Research IT of expenditures for non-profit, renowned publications put out by his department, publications that greatly enhanced the scientific reputation of the company, were needed. The informaticist believed that the issue was self-evident, and the absurdity of having to waste time and energy on justification reflected a serious gap in the VP's understanding of biomedicine and biomedical personnel. It seems axiomatic that when low-level employees in highly specialized industries need to provide remedial education on basic issues to senior executives, there is a problem. (The problem is in the general domain of 'mismanagement' by those who enable such necessities.)

Another major issue showing a lack of user focus by the VP of Research IT (now acting CIO) was a commandment to end the control of specialized informatics applications by “shadow groups.”   That term was actually used by the IT department, apparently representing a mentality that they were the “righteous” battling those lurking in the shadows who did not share the same IT “religion” (of authoritarian control, systems lifecycle design and other "plan-driven" or highly "disciplined" methodologies that often lead to healthcare IT failure), thus challenging the IT department’s hegemony on information. 

 

One such “shadow group” was molecular biology, who maintained their own supercomputer-based facility for molecular modeling and other high-performance computing needs.   As a favor to the informaticist’s department, the molecular biology group had also hosted on their computers an intensely processor-demanding medicinal chemistry encyclopedic resource (with several hundred years of data) and related toolset, easily accommodated by the supercomputers.  They also took care of periodic updates of the massive database for this resource, and this arrangement had worked well for all involved for several years.

 

The VP of Research IT found out about this arrangement.  For no particularly compelling reason other than control of territory through elimination of the dreaded “shadow groups”, this VP demanded the end of the arrangement and the moving of the aforementioned tools, only recently ported by the vendor to Windows NT but virtually unused on this platform in high-load production environments, from the UNIX-based supercomputers to corporate NT servers under the aegis of Research IT.  The VP was not sanguine about the informaticist’s and staff’s concerns that the NT servers might not be up to the task of housing this application, especially under heavy computational loads, and demanded the apps be moved immediately.  The tool’s vendor was similarly concerned and did not recommend such a move in a large-scale environment until further conformation of performance under NT was proven.  The VP still demanded the move ASAP. 

 

It was apparent the VP didn’t really care about the potential adverse effects on end users.  Despite distraction of the VP by other matters, loading the NT-based app onto the NT servers and testing under realistic loads was begun anyway as a precaution.  Results were deemed OK at light loads but not entirely reassuring when loads were heavy.  Yet, the test group was reluctant to share these concerns with the VP, primarily out of fear.  However, other factors intervened that caused the VP to become distracted, and thus the application’s home stayed in the supercomputer environment, mostly though ‘strategic noncompliance’ with cavalier decisions such as this.

 

The “other factors” that intervened included an encroaching reversal in company fortunes, due to competition, looming patent expirations on high-revenue drugs, late-stage pipeline failures (new drugs that failed before reaching the market) and a relatively weak pipeline of new drugs.  These problems seemed to originate a decade prior when a new CEO had been hired who lacked a background in biomedicine, replacing a CEO who did.  The new CEO seemed more concerned with social engineering and “diversity” than scientific excellence and the best minds.  It may not be a coincidence that a decade later, the supply of new drugs became weak, as it can take a decade or more from compound discovery to drugstore shelf. 

 

Meanwhile, the new CIO (brought in to replace the PhD CIO who left for biotech) lacked a biomedical background as well.  Reneging on earlier management promises to find a CIO with biomedical experience, the replacement CIO had a background far removed from biomedicine, being from a textiles-related manufacturing company.  That CIO was known best for cost-cutting, “standardization of platforms”, “reigning in of IT mavericks” (i.e., centralizing and consolidating control over all IT), and moving from custom applications to off-the-shelf applications.  The possible values of federated control over computing, computing creativity, and application customization in cutting-edge, extremely difficult and intensely competitive biomedical R&D was simply not considered.  The simple rule the new CIO espoused could be paraphrased as “one shoe that fits all is the best solution to any computing issue, and thus it shall be, always and forever.”  The informaticist noted little difference between this attitude and that of hospital “turnkey system only, no customization allowed” CIO’s lacking healthcare experience.

 

As a result of the declining scientific productivity and reduced projections of company margins, budgets started to be preemptively cut (despite the company having billions of dollars in cash reserves), perhaps to keep the stock price afloat.  The informaticist was asked to plan significant cuts to scientific information resources. 

 

The research IT leadership asked for cuts to be performed based on a metric of “cost per user per resource” for resources such as eJournals, Biosis, Current Contents, Dialog, SciFinder, Crossfire, and others.  The informaticist protested that such a simplistic, information technology-centric metric did not account for value of the resources, nor was a “user” a valid measure since some of these resources were used by individuals, by shifting teams of people based on research priorities at any moment, and by computer applications that fed alerting systems serving individuals and teams in a time-varying and unpredictable manner.  However, the Research IT finance person (non-biomedical background, MBA-degreed) and the VP of research IT insisted on these ill-conceived and potentially harmful metrics.  The conflation of IT with information science was never clearer to the informaticist than at this point.

 

To make the informaticist’s role even harder, the replacement Senior Director of Information Resources resigned suddenly, taking a position in another pharmaceutical company, while saying they would “never again work under computer people.”  An interim replacement was appointed – the Research IT finance person who lacked a library/information science background and biomedical experience.  The informaticist’s role in leading a quarterly information-needs focus group of top scientists was also taken away and given to the finance person.

 

Worse, as pressure for cuts became more severe, the informaticist was instructed to cut anything not under contractual obligation.  Much of the newly-expanded access to the most critical informatics tools fell under that umbrella.  The informaticist warned that the scientists would not look fondly upon such cuts, but the simplistic cost-cutting approach of the Research IT leadership prevailed, perhaps best expressed by the adage “IT giveth, and IT taketh away.”  The newly-given tools were indeed taken away from the scientists.

 

The senior scientific leadership basically revolted at that point.  The VP of Research IT was basically compelled to ask that access to the cut-off tools be restored.  Unfortunately, by the terms of the vendor this could not be accomplished until the following quarter, so the newly-facilitated research scientists had to operate once again with one hand tied behind their backs for three months.

 

The company’s fortunes continued to decline.  It appeared that several potential new drugs in late-stage clinical trials were going to fail to make it to market.  When that was confirmed, company leadership ordered a large-scale reduction-in-force beginning with mass layoffs.

 

Despite the informaticist-led reduction in rationing of information tools vital to new drug discovery, despite expansion of eJournals and alerting systems causing a tenfold increase in flow of targeted scientific articles to the labs over decade-long norms (thus filling long unmet needs), despite training several thousand scientists in better information search and retrieval techniques, despite the informaticist being a strong advocate for support of scientific R&D, the informaticist was first in line for separation when large-scale layoffs began. 

 

The layoffs reflected not a meritocracy but the exact opposite - an organization infatuated with social engineering and “diversity.”  The organization was careful to “balance” age, gender, race, and other factors in the layoff pool so as to avoid lawsuits for discrimination.  In other words, if they needed another, say, 45 year old white male to “balance” the layoffs, such a person would get screwed.  Further, employees were told that layoffs had nothing to do with individual performance.  In fact, the senior executives sent out a statement that:

 

Simply terminating low performers and replacing them with individuals we hope will be stronger ones will not achieve the objectives identified by our CEO and President of Research. Remember that the real purpose behind this exercise is to streamline the way we do work, eliminate lower priority work and invest in the areas most critical to our business. To the extent a work process redesign or consolidation necessitates that there be a comparative evaluation of the incumbent employees performing the work in question, it is possible that employees identified as “low performers” will be separated as part of that process … It’s important to note that these actions are about eliminating work that is not critical to the business and the positions associated with that work ... Each division prioritized its work and looked for ways to streamline its processes.

 

In other words, job performance of employees was in most cases irrelevant.  In fact, employees with poor performance histories were retained over employees with excellent records in the informaticist’s area.  Employees of high caliber with transferable skills across many areas were sent packing in many departments.  Anti-meritocracy is the epitome of foolishness for an R&D company whose assets are its employees’ cumulative brainpower.

 

Just to throw some salt into the wound, the informaticist had been required to take the “layoff training” that taught how to announce to an employee they were to be laid off.  When called to a meeting with HR and the VP on the targeted day, instead of receiving a list of people to lay off, the informaticist was laid off by the VP of Research IT, citing that “the role was no longer needed.”

 

It was clear this organization learned nothing from medical informatics. 

 

Soon after, a library for one major research site was shuttered, and its staff laid off.  Ignored were the direct recommendations of the informaticist, shared with top corporate management prior to the layoffs – recommendations to expand the libraries and encourage a scholarly environment as the company once had, not close the libraries and depend solely on electronic resources and the search skills of individual scientists to save some money.  (The amount saved annually probably represented a week’s marketing and advertising budget.)  This closure was also directly ignored advice given by an world-renowned emeritus scientist.  That scientist had invented a large number of life-saving drugs over his decades-long career in science, was an octogenarian and still publishing (he was one of the library’s best customers), and had explicitly stated in a memo that “an electronic library will never replace the written word … a computer can never fulfill the need to pull pertinent information together [in complex research], and I know it from more than fifty years of scientific assimilation and writing.”  So much for the company’s listening to the wisdom of the very people who’d made it great.

 

This pharmaceutical company, once considered quite excellent, has since taken significant “hits” to its reputation and stock value.   What could be described as a nihilistic, mission-hostile approach to long-term R&D strategy and, in effect, control of pharmaceutical research and research scientists by IT personnel certainly were not helpful factors.

 

This conflation of information technology and information science seems to exist in numerous pharmas.  This was confirmed by enlightened IT friends working in competing pharmas.  Numerous pharmas seemed to suffer this problem to one extent or another.  (The informaticist once had to explain to the international recruiter who contacted him from yet another large global pharma, not the one in this story, that their VP of Medical Informatics’ understanding of the field was inaccurate.   That VP took pioneer Homer Warner’s old definition of medical informatics "the study, invention and implementation of structures and algorithms to improve communication, understanding and management of medical information” quite literally, and believed the field was concerned with computer algorithms to process data.)

 

As an aside, the research paper “Defensive climate in the computer science classroom” may help explain the danger of IT hegemony over vital corporate functions very well --

 

As part of an NSF-funded IT Workforce grant, the authors conducted ethnographic research to provide deep understanding of the learning environment of computer science classrooms. Categories emerging from data analysis included 1) impersonal environment and guarded behavior; and 2) the creation and maintenance of informal hierarchy resulting in competitive behaviors. These communication patterns lead to a defensive climate, characterized by competitiveness rather cooperation, judgments about others, superiority, and neutrality rather than empathy.

 

What’s sad is that there is probably nobody in a leadership role at the company who would act upon the issues in this essay or perhaps even understand it.  The operative mode in today’s industry seems to be that if it’s not expensive advice from a wise management consultant from afar who adheres to the latest “management mysticism fad”, it can’t possibly be meaningful.

 

The VP of Research IT for this pharmaceutical company was separated some time after these events, apparently after not having an employment contract renewed according to several of the informaticist’s former colleagues, and now works for a computer gaming virtual-reality hardware company.

 

Anecdotally, the informaticist has heard from former colleagues at the company - each and every one spoken to - as well as the local barber who hears stories "from the horse's mouth" from customers across one of the company's major sites, and from a local physician who treats many patients associated with the company and their families - that the environment at the company is burning out the layoff survivors and that people are extremely unhappy. Layoffs still continue, which compound the problem of unhappiness and insecurity, especially for middle-aged individuals with a wealth of scientific and corporate knowledge - and mortgages and kids in college. The informaticist wonders how anyone can expect scientific creativity in such an environment.

 

To make matters still worse, this company still touts itself in its hiring ads and eRecruiting sites with puffery that might have been true in past decades, i.e., we are a wonderful place to work and a great place for a career.  The people who write this copy must understand the hollowness of their words.  Employees who read it fall into one of two groups:  those who believe it, and thus are deluded, and those who don’t believe it, and thus are demoralized by it and cynical. Environments of the deluded, demoralized and cynical are not the best for leading-edge drug R&D in the opinion of this author.

 

Finally, in line with the previously-mentioned pharma company that appointed a former Boston Chicken-McDonald's executive as CEO, perhaps Ronald McDonald could next be brought in to this pharma as head of human resources.  This might make for tastier food in the cafeteria, thus improving morale and scientific productivity.

 

(This final statement included a slight bit of sarcasm, in case that was not obvious.)