Agility and Impact: GeniePlus Delivers Results

This Global Pharmaceutical Company (GPC) is focused on creating creative, innovative products and new market categories in order to contribute to the health and well-being of people everywhere. Employees have access to a fully virtual library, offering over 2,000 online journals, 45 different pharmaceutical specialty databases, and over 100 market research report subscriptions.

The team of Information Services researchers is a mix of subject matter experts and generalists, whose sophisticated deliverables include full analyses and summaries of research findings. The completed packages include supporting file attachments, including datasets in Excel, PDFs, and Word documents.

The information services group provides continual training on enterprise-licensed content and databases to GPC staff in the United States and Europe. Last year, they delivered 36 virtual training programs, accommodating 800 new users via webinars with Q&A, and sometimes leveraging vendors. The training doesn’t just cover content. Because GeniePlus enables GPC to express its OPAC through the intranet, users learn how see what’s available, and how to submit requests from their desktops.

Virtual Information Center Success Factors

GeniePlus client, the GPC Director of Information Services, asserts that for virtual information service to succeed, the organization must have an excellent technology infrastructure, and the department must work very closely with IT. The Director also has a focus on expanding content licenses to cover the enterprise, saying, “This is an absolute must!” In tandem with this strategy, she states that people in her role, no matter the industry, have to be tough negotiators and hone their skills because many vendors have a no-discount policy. “Understanding that you’ll never get global licenses for everything is key; pick and choose, focus on the most important resources to start, and then explore whether others can be regionalized or localized. Start small and expand when possible.” The third element of virtual success is to know your clients as well as you can. The Director believes that in order to deliver the best resources and services, it’s critical to understand the organization’s top level direction, to know who and where the users are, and to understand which practice areas are in focus at any point in time. This is a continual process and “requires agility”—which we at Lucidea understand. GeniePlus ILS is designed with the agile library or information center in mind.

Stepping Up to GeniePlus

GPC began its relationship with Lucidea via DB/TextWorks, so when the time came to align with the organizational strategy of moving systems to the cloud, migrating to GeniePlus was a natural transition. In GeniePlus they saw the opportunity to gain powerful additional functionality for request management—and the ability to generate substantive usage metrics—via a web-based, sophisticated, cloud-based solution that aligned with corporate strategy. “We wanted to get ahead of that initiative on our own timeline.”

Measure it, Maximize it

Says GPC’s Director, “In order to understand our impact, expand services and operations, and develop strategies, being able to generate usage metrics is critical.” The GeniePlus request management module yields many insights. For example, because staff can track time to handle certain types of requests, see which global affiliates are leveraging the most resources, observe where demand is increasing or tapering off, and spot which therapy areas the specialists are supporting, she can negotiate internal chargebacks or justify and request augmentation of staff.

Reporting on data applies to Customer Relationship Management as well. Because the Information Services team members can see who requests specific content and services, who has attended which training, who asks for project support, and who doesn’t use Information Services, the department can provide targeted marketing, orientations, training, and awareness building for impact. For example, the Director quotes a representative instance where she said “You are using external consultants for things Information Services can do; we can save you $X—why don’t you come to us?”

The Language of Impact

Granular usage metrics generated within GeniePlus support evidence-based decisions and strategies across all the operational and strategic dimensions of Information Services, because after all, it is a business unit. For deep dive research requests, the end users are often consultants or contractors, so the Director needs to be sure the research has a valuable purpose. She routinely requests “impact statements” in support of these requests; this has the side-benefit of demonstrating the Information Services team’s impact when viewed in the aggregate.

The impact statement is a great surrogate for user surveys, which only get a 25% response rate. Because of GPC’s focus on business impact, it’s culturally acceptable to make Information Services support conditional on a robust response to the questions “Why do you need us? How will you use our research? What will that accomplish?” This approach has senior level advocacy, and informs the company’s business development, due diligence, and competitive intelligence initiatives.

In a changing world, with an increasingly mobile and remote workforce, GPC offers a great success story about how the GeniePlus sophisticated, purpose-built integrated library system supports a wholly virtual, global Information Services function holistically, and end-to-end.

In conclusion, GPC’s Director told us, “GeniePlus ensures system stability and integrity for our department’s most critical data and streamlines/enhances our workflows. GeniePlus supports the team’s strategies for staffing, resource allocation, customer relationship management (CRM), targeted marketing, and global service expansion.”

**GPC is an acronym used to protect the anonymity of this client due to legal requirements.