The life science industry has experienced a 179% boom in recent years. Emerging sciences and technologies have opened new avenues for treatment innovation, and investors are increasingly turning to growth-stage pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies to unlock these innovation opportunities.
For companies growing at a rapid pace, managing their evolving technology needs can be quite challenging. Growth-stage life sciences organizations need adaptable, compliant IT architectures, systems, and processes to support their operational and commercial expansion, but they are often faced with trade-off decisions:
- Affordability: how do we invest wisely, striking the right balance between building for today’s needs and building for tomorrow’s operating requirements?
- Talent: how do we quickly find, onboard, and right-size technology talent that understand our industry’s unique processes, systems, data, and regulatory requirements?
- Agility: how do we build out and manage a technology environment that offers the flexibility to adjust to our evolving needs while also providing the stability, reliability, and control required to satisfy our regulatory compliance obligations?
Companies that require compliant, flexible, and scalable solutions often do not find what they need in a traditional managed service provider. Here’s why.
The Problem with Traditional MSPs in Life Sciences
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have emerged in recent years as a means for many businesses to access technology products and services. Under this form of outsourcing, a company leverages a third party to set up and maintain portions of their IT infrastructure. Though effective in some situations, traditional MSPs often struggle to provide service levels that effectively support the needs of most emerging life sciences organizations. Let’s explore three of their more notable limitations, and then discuss how to overcome them.
One-Size-Fits-All Solutions
Traditional MSPs make money by providing the same capability to numerous clients. As their name suggests, they are in the business of providing a managed service – a utility. Client-specific customizations are difficult to accommodate and can even compromise the efficiency and profitability of the utility.
In addition, because the utility is not tailored to the unique needs of the client, the services are usually not aligned properly to the business strategy and goals. When a technology partner does not understand a client organization and their industry, it is difficult to ensure that technology solutions are scoped, costed, designed, and managed effectively.
For example, many life sciences firms need to leverage bioanalytical AI models and algorithms such as AlphaFold for the prediction of protein structures. Ensuring that the organization has a high-performing, secure environment that protects their information assets requires a technical approach tailored to the unique operating characteristics of these industry-specific algorithms: how they run, what data they need, what software services they require, how much computing power they consume, etc. These characteristics vary considerably across models and use cases, requiring tailored approaches to effective solution design.
Lack of Industry Expertise
Because they offer a utility applicable to all customers and industries, most MSPs lack the level of life sciences-specific expertise required to fully guide and support the overarching technology strategy and operating environment. This gap becomes especially visible in areas related to quality and regulatory compliance, where life sciences organizations have unique business, technical, and operating requirements.
For example, technology partners that cannot distinguish between testing, qualification, and validation – concepts that have very distinct industry implications – introduce notable risks for emerging life sciences companies that are already grappling with change.
It’s not enough to know the basics. For these life sciences businesses to grow and prosper, they need experienced leadership and talent. Ideally, technology leadership should be functioning as a key collaborator for growth, working alongside clinical and business leaders to co-create organizational plans and select fit-for-purpose applications and systems that support the anticipated growth journey. The process of integrating industry, technology, and company-specific forces into plans that can accelerate scientific and market traction is well beyond the reach of a pure utility provider.
Inflexible Service Levels
MSPs can sometimes be effective when infrastructure plans and resourcing requirements are fairly static. Unfortunately, for growth-stage life sciences organizations, those two assumptions are not true.
As organizations grow, their needs change quickly: business processes get re-engineered, systems get replaced, areas of required expertise evolve, and support requirements increase. These changes can occur rapidly, and utility providers are not set up (contractually or operationally) to dynamically alter their service levels, offerings, and industry-skilled resourcing on demand. Re-contracting takes considerable time and people to scope and renegotiate, adding additional distractions and delays to the growth journey.
So is there a better way to support the evolving technology needs of growing life sciences organizations?
Solving Problems with Tailored Technology Partner Services
As advisors and consultants to many life sciences organizations, CREO believes a Technology Partner Services delivery model – one based in a richer, industry-informed advisory relationship – is much better aligned to the growth trajectory that life sciences clients experience. Let’s explore how this model can overcome the challenges with MSPs.
Industry-Proven IT Leadership and Expertise
Technology-enabled value creation starts with building a strategic relationship with experts who can help you grow. Proven leaders serve as long-term collaborators on the growth and development of your organization. With a deeper understanding of your company and industry, they can co-facilitate the improvements needed to support your growth ambitions.
These leaders know that investments in technology can only pay off if people and strategies are well-aligned. Engaging a true partner to support your IT leadership (or serve as a fractional leader) can accelerate the development of IT-related strategies and roadmaps that ensure all the components of your business are moving in the same direction.
The best technology leaders know a lot more than the technology. They care about the science and take the time to learn your unique business. They understand industry business processes, regulatory requirements, software systems, and data. They know what has worked for other life sciences organizations and bring proven approaches to sustainable growth.
Tailored, Adaptive IT Solutions
More than a utility, a strong technology partner helps to optimize your mix of services and support over time. Choosing this relationship-based engagement model ensures that your company has access to a comprehensive array of services throughout the life of your business, on your terms.
Deciding how and when to invest in technology is a heavy consideration for growth-stage companies. Budget concerns and areas of liminality often push growth-stage companies towards temporary strategies that scale poorly. Putting scalable technologies and processes in place during earlier stages of business growth will remove future roadblocks and unforeseen costs before you reach them – a concept sometimes associated with the accrual of technical debt.
For regulated areas of the enterprise, a deep competency in regulatory compliance is helpful to anticipating the practical realities of scaling the business, especially as regulations change.
When a technology partner understands the entire business life cycle of your company, they can provide expert guidance on the systems that will provide your company with the best long-term ROI. This can help you avoid fragmented technology infrastructure that drains resources and jeopardizes operational stability and scalability. It can also help your team integrate new technologies and tools in ways that lead to faster results and better business intelligence.
Technical Operations, Cybersecurity & Operational Integrity
For businesses to grow effectively, the supporting infrastructure has to deliver. In life sciences, that means having a secure, reliable, scalable, and compliant environment to conduct the science and business of medical innovation.
The right technology partner keeps your organization functioning at peak efficiency by seeing to its day-to-day needs. Partners that deeply understand your business offer better operational support to your employees and business units. The work needed to keep your business running at peak efficiency – systems monitoring, maintenance, account administration, license management, end-user support, and more – can be better tailored to how your organization operates. Having the right-sized capacity to get those jobs done efficiently means that your resources have more time to do the amazing things they do.
Nowhere is this more important than in the realm of cybersecurity. The life sciences industry is currently one of the most targeted sectors for cyber-criminals, with single-breach costs estimated at close to $5M per incident. Without strong security practices, any company’s data and intellectual property can be vulnerable. Unfortunately, the partnership-oriented nature of many business operations – external collaborations, CRO & site agreements, supply and distribution channels, data partners, and more – creates an extensive array of potential vulnerabilities. And the continuously evolving set of software tools, accessible data, and social engineering techniques – including AI-powered threats – mean that organizations require even higher levels of operational diligence and threat monitoring.
But they don’t have to do it alone. An industry-oriented Technology Partner Services provider can bring the security, technical, business, and industry acumen together in an infrastructure that both protects the company’s mission and supports its growth journey.
Right-sized Technology Services for Growing Life Science Companies
Engaging the right Technology Partner Services provider can dramatically accelerate your company’s velocity and market impact. If infrastructure management, access to technical talent, or operational inefficiencies are pulling focus and resources away from pursuing the results that your investors are counting on, consider engaging a technology partner who is also an industry specialist.
Early adoption of scalable solutions allows life science, healthcare, and clinical research firms of all sizes to lay the groundwork for uninhibited growth. With flexible service options, CREO meets you where you are with affordable access to expertise and right-sized solutions, now and in the future.
