Business Need:

LEAPS Golden Thread Demo Screen

The drug development and licensing process in Theravance was complex and multi-layered. To manage the process, Theravance employees used a variety of tools and sites to gather and track information. This method was not meeting their needs: moving forward, they wanted comprehensive information to be available within a single system, enabling users to have immediate access to all data that might be relevant to their projects.

Key Contributions:

Mental Models’ role was to help Theravance understand the pieces and path to such a system. The project started with a review of existing tools used by the team, stakeholder interviews, and a review of potential applications that could play a role in the implementation.

Many techniques for information capture and discovery were combined in the design, the key challenge being how to render information discoverable regardless of source, initial intended use, or timeframe. One technique used was standard indexing, which included “scraping” of information from external sources such as web sites. Tagging techniques were also used. By incorporating Web 2.0 concepts, users could be given more sophisticated and powerful capabilities for “Enterprise Bookmarking”, ultimately enabling information to be more easily discoverable and correct information to be more efficiently found. This was essential -- whether the information was on a specific drug project, medical research, external articles or reports, it could be easily captured and tagged, and therefore discovered by other Theravance users.

The design also examined how to integrate data from multiple systems into a single portal so that critical information, alerts, tasks, events and other data would be readily available to users. The resulting prototype illustrated how discoverable information could be combined with Workflow, Relationship Management, Scheduling and Document Management applications to create a powerful project management tool. It also provided a mechanism for stakeholders to see high-level look and feel, how specific user needs would be met, and how an efficient, expandable information architecture could be incorporated.

Design Highlight: Bringing Web 2.0 Concepts to the Enterprise [Enterprise Bookmarking]

“Enterprise Bookmarking” refers to the use of social bookmarking or tagging in the enterprise. Essentially a core Web 2.0 function, many systems are now giving this “power to the people”. The resultant “folksonomies” and derived data such as popularity can promote/demote data, enabling correct data to be more efficiently found even as the amount of data increases. One key aspect is that even when content cannot be indexed, the tags and other forms of metadata can be applied to documents rendering them recoverable.

In the Theravance example, users have the ability to pull data from varied sources into their portal, and tag it based on multiple criteria, such as project or drug area, group, content, source, etc. Tags can be suggested by the system, for example, based on the project the document is being added to or the group the user is in. In addition, the user has the ability to specify ad-hoc tags as desired.