Court Square in the Round

John Hancock Didn't Have These Issues

2009-10-13T17:30:00.005-03:00

Last spring, I was hosting a life science leadership event that we put on in Malvern, PA. We tried to make it a different kind of event, one that was more about education and sharing of ideas. We even had impromptu panel discussions amongst the audience members. But one exchange highlighted a very important topic that was part interpretation, part semantics and part lightbulb moment.

The last topic of the day was on the use of SharePoint for 21CFR11 compliant document management. It was being presented by two of our SharePoint experts with one being the technical SharePoint specialist and the other being a life sciences expert. The topic of the moment was digital signature and/or electronic signature. A member of the audience pointed out that it seemed like this term was being used interchangeably when of course, they are not the same from a regulatory point of view. It resulted in a great discussion and one that highlighted yet another difference that a person's filter can create without meaning to. It can contribute to discussions (or sometimes diagreements) between IT and QA people who think they are speaking the same language but in reality the different dialects are getting in the way.

Our technical guy was referring to electronic and digital signature in roughly the same way, simply as a way to differentiate from a hard copy piece of paper. Moving toward electronic records is an important (and soon to be required) trend and there was a lot of interest in the room as to how the new version of SharePoint could accomplish that. But to the QA and life science people in the audience, electronic signature wasn't going to fly with an auditor while authenticated digital signatures were what they wanted to see. Our SharePoint expert immediately demonstrated that you can do both but that five minute exchange taught an important lesson about new meanings to common terminology in the IT world that can raise the hair on the back of a QA person if it means they fear a 2 x 4 from an FDA auditor. I doubt this is the first or only time that an IT person and a QA person saw things through a different filter.

We actually have modified that presentation to include a specific definition and distinction between electronic signature and digital signature as we always get a great mix of IT, QA and compliance people attending. This isn't a tomato/tomahto situation. It's the difference between a ripe tomato and one with a worm in it.

I did learn other great things at this leadership event (which we are repeating next month in Waltham, MA with different speakers).

*Malvern is a city near Philadelphia and Valley Forge and not just a particle size analyzer.

*Sleeping in a colonial era canopy bed is not as cool as I thought it would be when I was five.

*When you agree to film the 75 minute keynote speech, don't forget your tripod.

*When you forget your tripod and have to stand there and film him freehand, don't wear 3.5 inch heels and expect to feel your feet when you have to walk back to the front of the room to introduce the next speaker.

(C)Copyright 2009 CourtSquareGroup

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Socially Acceptable

2009-04-15T16:51:00.005-04:00

So everyone in marketing says you have to use social media more. You know all the sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and the site that I always thought was the most narcissistic thing ever, Twitter. But using it for B2B seems a little tricky out side of LinkedIn, which is really meant for business anyway. Finding my target market in Facebook or Twitter seems like going to a masked ball. How do I know if the VP of Regulatory for a biotech is posting in the Men who like knitting group in Facebook?

Ironically, I'm involved in a pretty interesting discussion in LinkedIn as part of a professional marketing group about using Facebook and Twitter for B2B. Nobody has the definitive answer or even more than anectodal evidence of it working. Everybody says write good, interesting content. Well, that's a little motherhood and apple pie because you always want to write good and interesting content. When my time is already at a premium, do I just Twitter anything important or interesting and just hope somebody out there is searching SharePoint for FDA regulated environments or how to help with the new Massachusetts Security Law. That doesn't sound much better than writing good web content and do your best SEO. How do you rise above the noise when it seems like Twitter is ALL noise?

It's pretty funny that businesses on Facebook have fans instead of friends. You want to be my fan? Really? You haven't even heard me sing yet. I was told by a expert in this field that the Facebook search engine is fast becoming one of the most used on the web. But what's behind that data? Is it mostly being used to find old classmates and colleagues or new musical acts? How much of that is for businesses and not to sound like a broken record, but how much of that is B2B?

I'm a big fan of LinkedIn and have jumped right into some good discussions. I've learned a lot too. I hesitated the first time I had to correct a very long post about what SharePoint couldn't do for life sciences companies, because so much of it was wrong. But years of posting on message boards for fun taught me the diplomatic way of refuting something without just posting WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! (Even though I thought it....)

It's kind of funny. I even feel like taking on different personalities depending on what site I am on. On LinkedIn, I'm in my suit and Anne Klein heels. On Facebook, I'm in jeans and munching on a snack. (I'm newly addicted to Orange flavored Craisins.) On Twitter, I'm in cutoffs and flipflops. (Looks in mirror, calls Pilates instructor to make the next session a little tougher.) Is meeting a potential client in a casual way better for potential business? Or will they still tell me that budgets are tight in the first half and ask for a handful of Craisins.

(C)Copyright 2009 CourtSquareGroup

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Merge Left

2009-03-12T16:37:00.003-03:00

The life sciences industry is seeing some serious consolidation in the past six months. Pfizer is buying Wyeth, Merck is buying Schering-Plough and today it was announced that Roche is buying Genentech. This makes sense for the most part as the larger pharmas are seeing their pipelines dry up as blockbuster drugs get ready to come off patent protection and there isn't much else behind it. It seems the smaller and more nimble pharmas and biotechs are better prepared for the future. But together, they may just find a better way.

Are these mergers smart business sense or more like you save me/I'll save you....we hope. It remains to be seen. Certainly those working for either company now have to do the nightly toss and turn about whether they are expendable once the companies consolidate.

The true beneficiary should be the American public as better drugs and therapies can get to market faster but when two giants merge, it may take awhile for them to get out of their own way. I've often wondered if they set up some kind of brain share to open up their laboratory notebooks and reveal what their research is showing. It's got to be a tough call during due diligence, just how wide do you open that kimono and share what could be a competition killer when the competition is the one who wants to buy you?

Court Square's Acquisition
Court Square saw all these huge acquisitions in life sciences so we decided to do one ourselves. OK, not really. It was a little more strategic than that. Besides, we can't command the headlines that a Pfizer or Merck can....not yet.

Last month, Court Square acquired the computer systems validation unit from QA Edge in the Philadelphia area. We're very excited about this expansion because it really adds depth to our very strong group and it accelerates our goal to expand down the east coast. It feels great to be able to execute a key part of our strategy.

Next stop, North Carolina. I'll volunteer to do the due diligence down there, preferably when it's pretty cold here in Massachusetts. With my luck, Keith will send me in August.

(C)Copyright 2009 CourtSquareGroup

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Quarters in the Couch

2009-02-17T17:57:00.005-03:00

So, how many people didn’t even look at their end of year 401K statements? Unfortunately, I had to because we are in the process of applying for financial aid for my daughter as she gets ready to choose a college. The FAFSA form requires all of that information. I do believe there was a line on there wanting to know on average, how many quarters do we find in the couch cushions each year? Too bad for them, I’m not telling.

The world’s kind of turned upside down right now and companies need to make sure they are doing everything can so they get their products and services to market faster and in the most cost effective way possible. But, what is the corporate version of finding quarters in the couch?

One of the best ways is to take unnecessary cost out of your company so that you are not forced to take necessary costs out (e.g., people). A relatively simple review of business processes can reveal inefficiencies, extra steps, steps that lead to dead ends or overly bureaucratic procedures. Now this can get a little tricky when you are trying to take steps out of a regulated environment but in many cases, business process optimization can also have benefits in improved regulatory compliance by having more efficient and automated audit trails.

Best practices are usually a good place to start and developing an IT quality audit ready toolkit for your IT processes can be done best with an ITIL foundation. The focus can be in two areas, one in qualification to keep those QA types happy and the other in ongoing operations so the IT people can take off the firefighting hats. It’s repeatable, efficient and most of all, compliant. Not only does that find more of those quarters but it keeps them from falling out of your pocket in the first place. (A side note for all the women out there, have you noticed in the age of cellphones that you start to look for more pants with pockets when shopping?)

I’m going to begin writing a book this month; we just got approval from the publisher. The title will be The Pharmaceutical and Biotech Industry Guide to ITIL V3. We’ve got a great authoring team including players from some of the best names in pharma and biotech and various experts in other areas within the industry. I’ll blog more about it later. I can’t tell you how many quarters it will cost yet and because the publisher is British, it will all depend on the exchange rate and whatever financial crisis the media can scare up at the time. But we’re not writing it to so that I can become the JK Rowling of the IT/QA world. We’re writing it because we think it’s an important concept to share. Yeah, if I make a few quarters on it, the couch will be more comfortable. Just don’t tell the folks at FAFSA.

The Marketing Maven

(C)Copyright 2009

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Stratego

2008-10-13T17:16:00.009-03:00

Remember that old board game? It's probably still available as an interactive DVD or virtual reality game now. But the reason it popped into my head was because this blog is about strategic planning. It always sounds like this rather lofty undertaking but it's very important and can be critical to a company's success, especially if it is done in a very dynamic way. Gone are the days when strategic planning documents were written up once a year in big 3 inch binders, to gather dust until the next year. The markets and industries change so fast and so elements of the strategic plan have to be flexible, even if the overall foundation of the plan need to remain firm.

B2B:Selling Brains
We developed a new business practice here for Strategic Consulting. (I always wondered why business units are also called practices. Don't you want someone who doesn't need any practice?) It's kind of hard to figure out how to market strategic consulting. Basically, it is selling brain power, from my business to yours.

B2B marketing can be tricky. In fact, I submitted a paper to the upcoming Marketing Summit about the unique challenges when trying to rebrand a B2B services company. I feel that every marketing conference gips those of us in the B2B services space. Sure, you get to hear from bigwigs at the brand name B2C product companies but I sit there and listen more as a consumer and not a fellow marketer hoping for sage advice. (I like marketeer instead of marketer, don't you? It's a lot like muskateer, without the plummage.)

Sometimes, the B2B folks will make an appearance but usually they are product focused, often from one of the big name software companies. You know the ones, my marketing budget is a rounding error for theirs. So, I thought it was high time somebody spoke for the B2B service providers. The ones that often make business run. We fill in the gaps that a business can't provide for themselves because they lack the skill set or because it doesn't make financial sense for them to keep that skill set on full time. Yay us!

It's easier to market B2B services when you specialize in certain industries, the way Court Square specializes in life sciences. Get all those experts in a room together and it's like a college class reunion. I sit there like I am invisible (if I were invisible, then I could just watch you in your (conference)room. Every time I hear that song on the radio, I yell WERE If I were invisible. Oh well, I guess pop music doesn't have to be grammatically correct.

Sometimes having all the experts in the room can be like dodging bullets. Everyone is trying to show off how much they know. One day I'm expecting to hear "My mother knows more about molecules than yours."

When we decided to expand our offerings to include strategic consulting, we met as the senior most people in the company and I asked around the room, "What do you know?" I was pleasantly surprised to see all the bases covered; Business Planning,Technology, Finance, Competitive Analysis, Product Management, Project Management. A couple of weirdos like me with both a chemistry and business background but the rest of the room was just filled with smart people. Smart people who can help other smart people.

So, I'm back to marketing brains again. Smart brains advising other smart brains, who just need help with one big area of transition. Where's Mr Spock when you need him?

The Marketing Maven

(C)Copyright 2009

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Juggling for a living

2008-09-19T10:16:00.005-04:00

There’s a line from a song on one of my favorite albums that goes like this:

Has anybody else but me ever felt this way before?
Like the world’s spinning much too fast and you’re falling through the floor.
Struck by lightning, it’s so frightening when the morning feels like war.
Unbreakable (don’t you wish you were) Unbreakable?

My paper covered desk sure does look like war.

This is a crazy time of year. Just when you’ve unpacked from the spring shows and your summer vacation, it’s call for papers time for next year’s shows. There’s Interphex and IQPC’s infrastructure in pharmaceuticals and Drug Information Association’s annual show and BIO 2009 and Project World and Bio-IT World and DisneyWorld…..Ok, strike the last one unless Peter Pan volunteers for some biotech clinical trial to show why he never grew up.

This one wants a short abstract, that one wants a short and long abstract and three learning objectives, this one wants money NOW before you can even begin abstract thinking. I really hate the ones who are so anal about their 156.5 word count that their online submission stops you at 156.9 words. Pretty soon, they will give you so little space; you’ll need to grab a teenager to help you.

U R Submtng a drg 4 resrch and IMO U need awdit

But it’s all worth it because not only do our people do a great job speaking but we meet very interesting people who further the discussions on different topics in pharma and biotechs.

I must confess that I do get annoyed when they treat vendor submissions as if we’ve all got a Scarlet V on our shirts. We’ve run into the no vendors rule, we’ve run into the vendors can speak but you must cough up the first year’s tuition at a public college first. That has never seemed fair to me, we’re not a huge company. My budget is probably a rounding error of the budget of the mega consulting companies yet I feel we’ve got just as much to say.

Another way around that is to hold events of our own. So right now, I’m working with both Cisco and Microsoft to hold two events within three weeks of each other. (Yeah, I’m kind of regretting that little move.) The Cisco one will be fun, it’s interactive discussion “How safe is safe enough?” No, it’s not talking about the fact that my broker put 5% of my holdings in AIG and Bank of America. It’s talking about internal and external vulnerabilities of your network. That one is local so I wonder if I can just hang a sign outside of my fifth floor office window. I’m a budget hawk, ya know.

The Microsoft one is actually an intersection of our SharePoint and Life Sciences. There’s been a lot of interest in just how to make a document management system compliant with 21CFR11. We’ll kick that around at this event. Microsoft is letting us use their Waltham, MA offices. The good news is that it is closer to a lot of the life sciences companies out in Eastern MA. The bad news is I will probably have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to get there on time. So, if you join us, please don’t comment on the bags under my eyes. I did find a nice image to represent electronic document collaboration for the presentation. It’s these two mice; don’t they look like they want to work together? It’s like a mice romantic comedy. Actually, I just liked it because it matched our logo colors.

Finally, I keep forgetting to tell you all about the interesting marketing ploy that another company tried to play on us. Our CEO (the one who actually has authoring rights to this blog too…hint, hint) got a letter from a website company. His executive admin saw it while opening his mail and brought it to me. The letter basically trashed my brand new website and said it wasn’t helping the business but of course, this company (I’ll be charitable and not say their name) could fix it. Well, it was Friday afternoon and I was tired and feeling…shall we say, Unbreakable. I called the author. I told him that our website in fact had gotten great reviews and even a new client within 48 hours of launch that paid for the whole project. He stammered and stuttered and said the letter really wasn’t that bad because in fact, he never even looked at my website. It was a form letter. I said “so basically, you sent these letters to CEOs all over the country, which probably resulted in a certain percent of our fellow marketing peers getting trashed and you don’t even look at the websites?” I was incredulous and he had nothing more to say.

It was a very good way to start the weekend.

The Marketing Maven

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There's No Business Like Show Business

2008-07-08T16:28:00.025-04:00

Tradeshows….Just the thought of them starts an ache in my back. Sometimes I find them a necessary evil and other times a crapshoot. It’s always strange to do a new show for the first time because you don’t know what to expect from a traffic perspective, especially if they switch locations every year. And in the competition for booth spiffs, stunts and attractions, someone is always raising the ante.

Interphex
We always do Interphex every year and this year was no exception. Well, the exception was that it was in Philadelphia instead of New York. Nobody ever said why, I think somebody didn’t book the Javits in time and they got bumped by the car show. At the end of Interphex, I wish I had gone to see the cars instead. It was nice to unveil the new brand and the new tradeshow graphic which actually has a giant sandbox on it.

The show had been morphing from an older manufacturing and packaging show to something trying to be more modern. Interphex normally has the main show on the first floor and the med device in the basement. This time, med device was the main floor and Interphex was one level up. Confused yet? To make it worse, the Pharma-IT section was in another zip code. They had a new section called Outsourcing but do you think they let us buy a booth there for the same price? .. Nooo. They put Pharma-IT with the Pharma-Automation section (distinguished by the ever popular different color carpeting) because of course a company that offers consulting services in IT, QA and Regulatory has everything in common with the booth next door showing off their pill counting machine. Last year (which I blogged about) we were across from people selling plastic tubs. Yes, I’m sure you can see the connection right away If so, please let me know what it is because I’m still scratching my head on that one. But Mr. Pill Counter and his noisy machine were very complimentary about our logo and tradeshow booth graphic so I can’t be mad at him, since we were both stuck out there in no man’s land.

The best booth stunt was an organ grinder with a live monkey. I'd like to know how he got beyond all the regulations to do that one! For many years we’ve had a celebrity impersonator in the booth while at the same time, Keith Parent and members of our life sciences team were giving interviews in the press room. So they get to play grownup while I get to waggle a camera at people to come take their picture with Elvis, Marilyn or Cher. This year, we decided to rent a big screen TV and play Wii sports with people. Let’s face it; I’m really just trying to get you into my booth so that we can talk about how Court Square can help you. Partly because I need to show an ROI on this show but mostly because I really think we can help.

This year, I got tennis elbow for the same privilege. One woman, claiming tennis stardom in her college years, was so aggressive with her backhand; she practically knocked over my booth. I was waiting for her to go change into a little white dress with terry cloth wrist bands and recruit a passerby to be the line judge. I would have thrown the game if it meant a hot lead for our sales team. Yes, I can swallow my pride for the sake of a project implementing document management or doing a quality audit. Just keep that between us, though. I wouldn't want to give my sales colleagues any idea.

The traffic in the Philadelphia Interphex was much slower. The food was non existent so you had to walk across the street to the very interesting Reading Terminal Market. I would love to see this place on a normal day because when the Interphex lunch traffic poured in there, it was 90 minutes to get your cheesesteak. For me, there were two good things about Interphex Philadelphia. First was the ease to walk back to your hotel instead of trying to hail a NYC cab at shift change. That takes either a miracle or a lot of money to pay the guy in the Town Car. The second was convincing a coworker to take a train ride up to NY to see Monty Python’s Spamalot for my birthday and then take the train back, all in the same night. We got back to the hotel at 1 AM. Of course if Interphex had been in NYC, I could have had sleep on my birthday to go with the laughter. That would have been verra, verra nice. (That’s a Python joke not a typo.)

I’m glad Interphex doesn’t normally move around and for 2009, I expressed my dismay to the show people about the bad location (OK, I whined) and so we have a booth in the outsourcing section next year. All you CROs and CMOs better look out, I will probably bring back another impersonator. I know where all the super secret service elevators are in the Javits too. The best thing about Philadelphia is that we did have some good interviews; look for an article on auditing in one of the major journals next month.

BIO International-San Diego
Last year the big BIO show was in Boston so I drove out there and met up with Keith Parent (who promised me a blog about all his world travels recently). This show is so different from others in that it is very international and more economic development focused. Not to mention after 4 PM, it’s like a giant frat party with each country trying to outdo the other in terms of food and various liquid refreshments.

We decided to join the Massachusetts pavilion this year in a booth. I was unable to make the trip so two of our sales team went out with Keith. Unfortunately, they ran into weather and flight delay problems and it took almost 36 hours to get out there. The mini booth made it before they did; I told them they should have just checked themselves as luggage. The show is not one where a lot of business is done in the traditional sense; it really is one where you get a great feel for what is going to happen in the industry over the next couple of years. It is also a great way to interact with other regions around the world. BIO is one of those “seen and be seen” type of events. This makes it a great show but it also makes it difficult to attract booth traffic without some real flash. I look forward to attending the next one in Atlanta. I’m still thinking about the flash. Any ideas?

DIA Annual-Boston
Last year the annual meeting of the Drug Information Association was in Atlanta and Keith chaired a session with a few customers on Good Systems Practice. I remember that he called me from the show and said it was an excellent event and that we should be at the next one. The good news is that it was in Boston, which is 90 minutes down the Mass Pike from our headquarters and even closer from our eastern Mass office. The better news is that he got invited back to chair a session again. The bad news is it was starting just 36 hours after BIO ended on the opposite coast so I had to send our mini booth to San Diego and keep the big booth for Boston.

To make matters worse, I had booked my family’s vacation over the Christmas holiday without looking at my work calendar and ended up overlapping DIA. Not that I didn’t enjoy getting a good sunburn while snorkeling off of a catamaran in Cozumel, but I really wanted to attend this event.

Since we had never exhibited at this conference, I added a few extra things for the sales guys to have in their arsenal. Some Red Sox tickets, some foldable flying Frisbees with our new logo and I sent along our Wii to play. Everyone wants toys at this show, I guess those clinical types like to play after trying to rid the world of horrible diseases during the day. Most shows never use up much collateral (data sheets and whatnot) but this one did. Although I often wonder where that collateral ends up. I'm sure after I hand you an expensive data sheet,you’ll get tired of carrying it and throw out on your way to the parking lot or when you pack up that suitcase to go home. It's Ok to admit it, I do the same thing.

We had some great conversations and it gave us the opportunity to announce our new clinical and regulatory services as well as our involvement as a member of the Clinical Research Consortium of Massachusetts. The CRCM is a group of four companies working with other countries to help them set up clinical trials centers of excellence. First up is Italy. Now I really regret not learning Italian from my maternal grandmother but she wanted to learn English instead. C'est la vie. (See, I told you I never learned Italian.)

So the bottom line and the answer to my pondering many paragraphs ago (for those of you still awake) is that some tradeshows are necessary evils and some are very worthwhile. Interphex has fallen in between those two, we’ve met some great new customers there and you can’t beat the exposure to editors. But they treat IT like an after thought. Thankfully, since we are more than an IT company, we get to play in the outsourcing sandbox next year. In pure, explain it to our Comptroller spreadsheet ROI-ese, BIO isn’t worth the booth rental but you don’t really attend BIO to make a sale. You attend BIO to get the pulse of the industry and meet extremely interesting people. DIA is a great show for education and for doing business but remember to bring toys. I usually don’t like toys at a show because people take them without even saying hello or buying you dinner and a movie, it’s like a drive-by. But at DIA, they wanted to know what we were about too. It probably helped that one of our account guys apparently was a carnival barker in a previous life.

My one request for all you show/conference managers. Please standardize! Even with a running spreadsheet, my intern had a hard time of keeping track of- this show package has carpet but this one doesn’t. These two have tables but the third doesn’t even say. Do we want a skirt on the table? Do we want a skirt on the sales guys? HEY! I think I just found the flash for BIO 2009.

The Marketing Maven

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What's in a Name?

2008-03-09T16:22:00.020-04:00

So, hopefully you’ve noticed the blog looks a little different. Court Square is launching our new branding this week and with it we’ve changed our name from Court Square Data Group to Court Square Group. Clever, eh? Those folks who went from Federal Express to FedEx have nothing on us.

But it’s more significant than it looks on first glance. We knew we wanted to modify the company name since we’ve always done more than data related projects. The company has grown from its base of infrastructure services to include application services, managed services, security and network services, complex project management offerings and a substantial line of services for the life sciences industry. We’ve got experts in everything from quality and compliance consulting to clinical. Now we get to find out why those commercials for asthma medicine list more side effects than relief. Forget A to Z, we can go from IQ to OQ to PQ. (I’d love to go for GQ but the HR manager won’t let me ask for an 8 x 10 glossy when I’m reviewing resumes for a new product manager.)

It was hard to decide how much to change the name because of the existing brand equity in our old name. So we decided to keep Court Square in the name. The company was born in the Court Square section of Springfield, MA and we’ll be moving our Headquarters back there in May. We’ve grown so much that we need a lot more space. Who says you can’t go home again? Well, besides Thomas Wolfe and that was 80 years ago. Maybe he couldn’t afford a car. Plus, he was from Asheville, North Carolina. Once you get that Vanderbilt dude building a little shack called The Biltmore, it’s hard to keep up with the Jones’.

Court Square Group also speaks to the fact that we are going to grow more large practices such as Financial Services or Manufacturing, so that these vertically focused practices could eventually be divisions within the Group.

Tag, you’re it.
So, we did some positioning work with a multi-site, cross functional team. (Which is just a fancy way of saying a group of people that I coerced into joining me on the project.) The tagline exercise was very long but kind of fun. No thin skin possible in that session, everyone had an idea ceremoniously massacred at one point. One colleague, who shall remain nameless, kept trying to find a way to use the word “clarity” in every suggestion. I’ll cut him some slack because at one point he tossed out “the business of science”. That got everyone’s attention. We moved to “driving the business of science” but that sounded too one sided so we settled on “Drive the business of science” which is much more collaborative sounding. Then we talked about how that might sound too focused on life sciences when we service many other industries, especially manufacturing and financial services. But technology is a science so it still fits.

Living La Vida Logo
So, the branding company, a group of crazy people called Hot Diggity Creative, took all this work done over two 3.5 hour sessions back to their cave in New Hampshire and did whatever it is that really creative people do. (I’m not sure I want to know exactly.) A few weeks later, my little multi-site, cross functional team, huddled together with the guys from HD Creates (that’s what they call themselves when they want to look grown up) including the creative director, one Argentinean hombre named Mario who is both madly talented and just a little madly insane. (Mario has since opened up his own company, called Salsa Creative and he has the best of HD with him.) He popped up the first storyboard and we sat up in our chairs. It was red, that’s the first thing we noticed. Rojo-and Bold. The new name was together with no spaces with a very crisp font and it had a symbol over it, what was that? A paper airplane? Ooookay. I liked it but I didn’t know why. All I knew was that whole worlds of marketing possibilities were already swimming around in my head.

The next two were very different but similarly themed. They were well done and a few liked it but nothing got the reaction that the first one did. The last choice was a safe one, with the same colors as our old logo.

The group was pretty unanimous on the first choice. We decided to take the temperature of the CEO (Keith, who you met here in December) , since he is also the owner of the company. A few of us braved his office and proudly showed him our first choice. (We figured if he liked it, our work was done. If not, well then my team figured their work was done and I had to figure out what to do next.) He didn’t exactly jump for joy but it was a big change so we gave him some space to chew on it. It’s a business choice and an emotional choice since he started this company from scratch in 1995. I mean I know how I would feel if someone walked up to me and said they were going to legally change my name and look to Angelina Jolie. On second thought….

Color Me Surprised
One concern he had was the color red. At first I was thinking, “the color? A guy is worried about color?” I guess back in the day, red on your computer screen was a bad thing. But since Oracle and Cisco don’t seem to mind, I worked with Super Mario who did some quick designs of other potential logos uses so that the vision we both had in our heads was something tangible for others to see. In a happy accident, one Senior VP drew the logo for another on a napkin or something and he inadvertently made the vapor trail of the airplane look more like a “C” for Court Square. That was a hit. I’m sending that napkin to the Smithsonian. But the biggest help of all was that Keith’s wife liked it. I think I’ll send her some flowers. What color do you think I should choose?

It’s all here
So, we were off and I worked with the different groups at Hot Diggity (now Salsa) to create an entirely new website, data sheets, pocket folder, tradeshow graphics..you name it. In a ridiculously short period of time. The most fun was the tradeshow booth graphic. Someone on our branding team said something about playing in a regulated sandbox of any kind when we talked about making sure people realized that our life sciences focus didn’t mean we still don’t excel in other industries. That put a silly idea in my head which I casually mentioned to the creative guys and the next thing I knew they were building a sandbox in their studio (complete with 10 bags of real sand) and setting up a photoshoot. It is going to get people’s attention at Interphex at the end of this month, that’s for sure.

So, the messaging is right. The color is red. The new website is exactly what we wanted, to show how good we are. (Hey, if you think that’s cocky one of the possible taglines was “born from experts.”) Now that this enormous project is over, I can get back to writing blogs about topics that are important. I’ll give my summary of Interphex, which is expanding its scope this year. In the meantime, check out the new website at www.courtsquaregroup.com.

And oh yeah, how about those RED Sox?

The Marketing Maven

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Moving an Industry

2007-12-09T13:34:00.000-03:00

Is this thing on? I'd like to introduce our CEO Keith Parent. Keith will be joining us on the blog from time to time. Our "voices" will be different but that way you guys won't get sick of me.

Welcome, Keith!

-Cori-

Working for a living

Everyone needs a reason to do what they do!! Our reason is to push an industry to use technology better than they have in the past. When I started Court Square 13 years ago I really only wanted to have a job and create a place for good people that wanted to do a good job for other people. Over the years we had to define that "Uniqueness" that everyone says you have to have. I believe we've found that with our approach to managing infrastructure and applications in the Life Science's industry.

What does that mean? Well, when I started out in this industry it seemed like we were doing some really cool projects but they were just different IT related projects. Over the years our largest client became one of the industry leaders in the Pharmaceutical field and we learned some amazing lessons about drug discovery and the whole drug development lifecycle. As the cost of developing a drug skyrocketed it was imperative for the industry to figure out a better way to do things. One of those ways was to utilize their computing environments far better than they had in the past.

Changes in the life sciences industry
When I first started it wasn't unusual to have many different networks running in a single organization with multiple servers hiding out under scientists desks. It seemed that every scientist that got a grant felt that it was his obligation to provide his own computing infrastructure because the corporate IT folks just didn't "get it". Well that could have been true but the reality is that the scientists became more enamored with their collection of computing resources than the science that they originally started with. I don't know if it was shear market forces that caused the individual departments to finally figure out that they wanted to work more on their science and less on maintaining a computing infrastructure. Fast forward to today and you'll see an entirely different attitude where the scientists know that they are using computing far more than they did in the past and it is imperative that someone else take care of those resources because they simply don't have enough time in the day to do so.

Well this gets us back to our uniqueness. Over time we did many different projects, both large and small and I realized that the success or failure of the project usually was determined by the individual running the project and their background. What we wanted to do was come up with a way to create a consistent method for achieving quality for all our projects and we latched upon the Project Management Institutes PMI certification for all of our project management leaders. It has proven to be a wonderful way to provide far more consistency and quality and also to truly set customer expectations right out of the gate. The uniqueness continues by having to also manage that infrastructure and application environment after we've completed the project to implement it. Well that's where ITIL comes into play. We combined both PMI and ITIL to create what we call Good Systems Practice. It's just really common sense and adhering to standard practice. This can sometimes be a really difficult thing for IT centric guys and gals to do. I really don't know why but they always have to feel like they are solving the weightiest problem in the world when really someone has probably already solved it and the answer is just sitting out there waiting for them to find it. Cori has discussed GSP in our blog earlier so I won't go into any more detail but that became our uniqueness. Now it's getting the industry to recognize how to innovate by using best practices.

DIA Outsourcing Summit 2007
Recently I was a speaker at the DIA Outsourcing Summit in Ft. Lauderdale Florida. It was a great gathering of people in and around the pharmaceutical industry with multiple tracks to satisfy a fairly broad base of people. I was part of a panel that spoke about changes in the industry and how using GSP would result in higher quality and more predictable outcomes when it came to working with IT vendors and staff. Really it's also the interaction of the quality staff and the IT staff that's just as important in a highly regulated Life Science industry. The DIA conferences are always very well attended and it's a great organization for promoting the best practices to improve service delivery within the drug development community.

In my next entry I talk about another recent panel that I was on for the New Jersey Technology Council. If you are located in New Jersey and you don't know about the NJTC then you probably should.

Thanks,

Keith

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SaaS, Sassy and Sasparilla

2007-08-28T09:43:00.000-04:00

I know, I know. It's been two months since I've blogged. I guess I haven't felt in a sassy mood. It's not easy to write like that in between vacation, catching up after vacation, and writing formal business plans and white papers. As a colleague said to me today, "white paper is death to blogger girl". It's hard enough to be amusing and informative on these IT topics as it is. Some of you are thinking "We're still waiting."

There's an awful lot of talk around here about software as a service (SaaS). I wasn't all that familiar with it until a few years ago. When someone first said SaaS, I thought they were talking about that complicated statistical program. They enlightened me about software as a service. A service? Does it program the car to pick up the kids after practice? Can it clean these piles of paper off my desk? I'm sure there's a July blog in there somewhere.

SaaS, is also known as "pay by the drink", which tells me this was probably coined on New Year's Eve or at Yankee Stadium. Put simply, it means you pay for what you use. It's like buying utilities but in this case, it is more interactive (unless of course you have mood lighting in your office in which case you probably are charging by the drink.)

This all fits in nicely with the whole concept of managed services. The focus on managed services has been often on the infrastructure side for many years. Application hosting providers did develop offerings where they provided secure data centers to host your software and save you money. One view of how the whole concept of software as a service evolved is in this blog. I don't know if he's right but I like the title of his blog.

But why not tie it all together? Is it possible to offer remote or collocated infrastructure managed services along with basic infrastructure application hosting, all managed by one company?
Not scared yet, how about adding vertical specific applications for a simple, no pressure industry like pharmaceuticals or biotechs? You know, these industries that need a qualified infrastructure and validated application before the big bad wolf comes knocking. Qualified? Validated? Does that mean the valet is trained by a government official to put the little sticker on your parking slip?

But we think it can be done and to raise the ante a bit, we think it can be done in a way to accommodate companies at different stages of their drug development lifecycle. It requires strong software partners with good products combined with the expertise of hundreds of collective years of life science experience.

My question to you all (ya'll), is it needed? Will companies be willing to pay for it? Can a qualified infrastructure and validated applications be bought by the drink like a bottle of sasparilla? Can we even buy sasparilla anymore? Or is it just root beer with a fancy name that they try to tell me is also spelled sarsaparilla. (That just sounds like sasparilla with a bad accent.)

What say you? I'm interested in hearing opinions on this topic. You can comment here or email at blog@csdg.com.

The Marketing Maven

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Pouring the Foundation: Adventures in ITIL Training

2007-06-21T08:37:00.000-04:00

Last week I attended a three day training session in order to obtain my ITIL Foundations certification. Our CEO's commitment to ITIL includes a goal for every employee to achieve at least this level of certification. This includes marketing geeks like me and not just the usual breed of techie geeks.

Now I really didn't have the time for three days out of the office and away from home when I could have been blogging or flossing my teeth or something. I've read a tremendous amount of material on ITIL and written plenty so it was an interesting proposition to compare this tactical training with the high level look that I've had.

When I got to the classroom set up at the hotel, I immediately noted the Medieval Torture Chair that would be my home for the next three days. I had brought a back pillow but it was sadly ill matched.

The training consisted of part lecture and part simulation using a Formula 1 racing theme. The class was larger than typical and I was assigned to the equivalent of Level 2 support. Each time a car had a problem, the "service desk" sent us a ticket. Of the seven members on my team, only three were technical folks, the rest of us were marketing, sales or administrative types. To us a ticket is for a concert or for speeding. (Or in my case, speeding to a concert.)

The instructor explained that the game required Level 2 support to match the incident number to a piece of software or hardware on a gameboard and solve a puzzle. The example she gave was "what comes next...2,4,6,8,?" OK, we're good to go.

No ITIL, no Control
They're off to the races and it is chaos. Now in hindsight, it was supposed to be chaos because there were no processes or procedures and no change management in place. By that point, the Medieval Torture Chair was looking pretty inviting.

And those puzzles. I think the super smart lady in Parade Magazine, Marilyn Vos Savant (yeah, like that's her real name) designed these. After the instructor's example, I was expecting "Fill in the blank....Twinkle, Twinkle, Little ______"
Nooo, we had math puzzles and puzzles with dominos. Dominos? Unless there's a pizza involved, give me a different question. The puzzles with letters were expecially confusing. And the tickets came fast and furious. Who built these cars? Yugo?

Adding some control
Then we learned about Incident and Problem Management and developed simple processes for us to try again. By this time we had figured out that the letter puzzles corresponded to numbers. So you had to translate the letters to numbers, solve the number puzzle, translate back to letters, do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself around and then give your answer. I'm not sure what that taught me about ITIL but it did give me an appreciation for Tylenol. After five minutes I was hoping for a question along the lines of "What is the capital of Afghanistan?"

Making ITIL elements work together
By the final simulation, we were ready. . We had matched the car problems to applications on the gameboard, spent "money" on extra capacity for a key server, two railroads and Park Place and assigned an Incident Manager, Problem Manager, Change Manager, Configuration Manager and massage therapist. And I was off puzzle duty. The chair of Medieval Torture hadn't gotten any better but the cookies at lunch did. Things ran a little smoother and we scored better.

Did all of this help me pass the test? Hard to say, I think I would have gotten the same score by studying the materials, doing the practice exams and seeing my chiropractor. But the overall process gave me a greater appreciation of just how important processes and procedures are combined with best practices and all the elements of ITIL working together. Good Systems Practice is not just a nice brand that cost me $125/hour for a good trademark attorney. It is essential to control and prevent chaos, system failure and money loss.

Standardize the testing, please!
A sidenote to the certification bodies and my friends at itSMF. There are two certification tests; the one from the British group (ISEB) and the one from the Dutch group (EXIN). In addition to adding one more module, the EXIN test is deeper (in my opinion) and the sentence structure can be confusing. If we're looking to certify people in best practices, there shouldn't be such a discrepancy in the certification process.

The Marketing Maven

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A Tale of Two Cities: Interphex and BIO2007

2007-05-11T16:06:00.000-04:00

In the past few weeks it seems that I have been immersed in pharmaceutical and biotechnology and that's not counting the Costco size bottle of ibuprofen I've needed for tendonitis in my shoulder and elbow. Spring is conference and convention time and this year Court Square exhibited at Interphex (International Pharmaceutical Congress) and attended Bio 2007 conference and exhibition. Both shows focused on life sciences but one was more tactical by design and the other very strategic and economic development focused. Also, because we actually exhibited all week at Interphex, I tend to associate that more with sore feet than long term strategies (see ibuprofen comment above).

Interphex

Interphex is a smorgasbord of equipment, manufacturing, IT and packaging in pharmaceutical. I was thinking that this year seemed a little dated despite the addition of pharma-medical device. I am pleased to see that next year's show is merging with a European Biotechnology show and also adding a contract services section. I think that will breathe new life into this show which seemed to have lost a bit of its edge, which is rather ironic considering the industry is at the cusp of innovation. Or perhaps that is a metaphor for the differences between big pharma and the "younger" biotech segments.

They are also moving the show to Philadelphia from New York City which is great news for those who find that you have to walk halfway back to your hotel to find a cab when the show ends each day at 5 PM. The best moment of the week for me was when my colleague chewed out the cab driver for doing shift change right when people need the cabs the most. The second best moment was the day when I had a booth stunt to attract leads. Every year we have a pop icon impersonator for pictures. This year we had "Cher". It amazes me to hear grown men giggle when you ask if they want a picture.

Bio 2007

The BIO show had a completely different feel. This is an international convention with every state, Canadian province and bio focused country represented. It was like a boy scout jamboree for biotech. There was so much excitement and momentum for the innovation that filled the brand new Boston Convention Center. The planners of the BIO event had decided on an interesting juxtaposition of having the high tech brochures and information handed out by Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. "The medicines are coming! The medicines are coming!" Sorry, I guess growing up in Massachusetts has made me a little immune to the whole American Revolution thing since that traumatic experience of reading Johnny Tremain in the 7th grade.

I spent the first day with our CEO (whose blogger finger is apparently broken) and at the end of the day we discussed how great it is to be a part of this industry, especially at a time when many speeches discussed how information technology will play an even greater role. He wants Court Square to help change the industry and I think we can. Walking from pavilion to pavilion, you could see the pride in their role in bringing biotech advances to each region. And in the late afternoon/evening, each region tried to outdo the other on the hospitality side. The whole event was like a series of ground breaking lectures and final exams followed by frat parties.
"Hey, Italy's got hot food in their booth! Quebec has maple sugar candy (much to the chagrin of Vermont)! Belgium has the best beer this afternoon." (This self proclaimed teetotaler didn't even know Belgium was famous for beer, I thought it was just waffles.)

The Future

In the end it was the 15 minute lunchtime key note address by a passionate Michael J. Fox where he was knowledgeable, funny yet obviously coping with his Parkinson's symptoms that gave me an even greater commitment to helping my Court Square colleagues change an industry. Whether it will be helping a start up biotech with a virtual IT environment that will scale as they grow or hosting some applications for an established biopharma or working with a big pharma on their latest acquisition or even working hard to establish more Court Square offices in bio hotspot regions….we're ready to ride the wave. I just hope the CEO signs off on the surfboard that's on my expense report.

The Marketing Maven

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Stop the audit, I want to get off!

2007-04-05T11:01:00.000-04:00

I know it's almost April 15th so the talk of audits might scare some people. (Be thankful you don't have my accountant who initially told me I was getting a $2000 refund but later said I owed $500. And she charged me $400 for that news.)

Audits in regulated industries
But this blog isn't about auditing your taxes, it's about audits of IT departments in regulated industries. These are the industries like pharmaceuticals, biotechs, banking and healthcare. As we noted in a previous blog about IT versus QA dynamics, audits and audit requirements can create havoc within a company.

A bad cycle
Some disturbing observations that we've come across with clients is the whole concept of remediation as a given after the auditors pack away their clipboards and leave. Companies budget for remediation expense as if it is something they must accept. Some companies are audited more than once a year by different agencies. So for them, it's audit, remediate, audit, remediate. And there's a Ka-ching after every audit. It reminds of those clown punching bags we had as kids. Smack it, it falls over and then pops up for the next smack. And they smile and say "Thank you very much, Mr. Auditor".

The real problem may be that remediation only addresses the findings, it does not address the underlying causes that create the cycle in the first place. It's like getting a nail in your tire and just patching it. Perhaps the real answer is you shouldn't be driving over the nails in the first place. Some companies need help finding the road without the nails.

What's the answer?
If companies could avoid or at least dramatically reduce remediation cost, then the savings could be invested in strategic projects, dropped to the bottom line or passed on to their clients. IT would no longer just be looked at as a cost center by the CFO, affectionately known in most companies as Dr. No.

Companies on the audit carousel who are getting a little dizzy need to conduct a thorough assessment of their environment against standards or best practices such as ITIL. If they created a pareto diagram of the areas being tagged for remediation after each audit, they could match these areas to ITIL elements for guidelines to a more robust solution. Not only should these remediation dollars lessen, but efficiencies may also result. If a company doesn't feel comfortable stopping the carousel on their own, give us a call and we'll take you for a spin.

Court Square will be discussing important issues like this at a number of conferences this year as noted in our calendar. (And it only took three marketing interns to show me how to add that to our blog template. Yeah me.) Come visit us at Interphex this month in New York in booth 3133. If you come on April 25th, you can have your picture taken with "Cher". I'll talk about some highlights of the show in a post-Interphex blog.

The Marketing Maven

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Server Consolidation: Don't be Afraid of the Dark

2007-03-07T11:01:00.000-03:00

IT Cost Cutting Pressures

In the age of constant cost pressures within regulated industries (especially Pharma), IT departments are being asked to do more with less. (Translation: We're increasing your workload and cutting staff so don't sign up for that 5:00 Pilates class.)

But sometimes the answer has less to do with utilization of staff and more to do with utilization of servers. From a cost savings perspective, this is the true low hanging fruit. (Why is it that fruit gets all the glory? And what about tomatoes? Low hanging tomatoes are rotting on the ground.)

Server Proliferation
Often companies implementing new applications would follow a "one app needs one server" mentality. This is sort of like saying you have to take five kids to baseball practice and so you simply go out and buy four more cars. Seems like a waste of money and totally inefficient, right? That's because it is. Not only did you just waste money on the purchase, but you still have to fuel, maintain, insure and garage those extra cars. Servers and data centers are the same.

Consolidation: Why and Why Not?
So if it is all so obvious, why isn't server consolidation considered more often? Gartner estimated a few years ago that corporate servers run at a 20% capacity. A manufacturing manager wouldn't accept that situation in a production environment and IT managers shouldn't either.

In regulated industries, especially life sciences, there may be many reasons but typically one common one. Fear.Remember our last blog about IT versus QA? FDA and audit guidelines practically scream "Don't touch that qualified server or those validated applications because we're watching you!"

But it doesn't have to be that way. Granted, when FDR said "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself", he probably wasn't looking at a stack of non conforming reports from a stringent FDA auditor. But using Good Systems Practice (GSP) with a solid change management foundation combined with an understanding of when you should and shouldn't combine applications can make the whole process less risky and less costly.

For example, you shouldn't put your office applications on the same server as your clinical research data because that's just asking for trouble whenever you make a simple change to the office application. Sort of like avoiding having your salad on the same plate as your filet mignon. (Is this blog making anyone else hungry or is it just me?) But an assessment of your in-use applications and the current server set-up can help design a server consolidation plan of action that will work for your business needs, your regulatory needs and your financial goals.

Virtual Servers
New technologies in virtual servers increase the possibilities. Products like VMWare or offerings from HP, Sun and IBM create the behavior of application partitioning without the increased hardware purchases, and space requirements.

A short assessment is a good place to discover where to start your server consolidation project as well as help you identify that low hanging fr….non-vegetable and determine if you can take advantage of a virtual environment. We can help you with that. For more information on steps necessary to start saving money by eliminating things you don't need instead of people you do, see our white paper at www.csdg.com or contact me through blog@csdg.com.

We welcome your comments and questions here at the Round….even if you want to throw tomatoes.

The Marketing Maven.

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IT Versus Quality: Celebrity Death Match?

2007-02-16T13:13:00.000-03:00

Most departmental disconnects that you hear about when talking about IT departments is that the IT group doesn't care about the business. The CFO thinks they are just a big expense line item. Other end users think they just love the bells and whistles of the latest kewl tool, whether or not it renders the system user-friendly or supports the business needs. Haven't you heard or said at least once in your life.. My computer isn't working right, IT must have done an "upgrade" complete with eye roll and that annoying finger quote gesture. In turn, IT people would complain that the end users didn't know what they needed or else they wanted everything.

Thankfully, a lot of this has changed over time as end users become more technology savvy and IT implementations are conducted with more discipline and emphasis on business value. But…there remains one last frontier for a standoff and that's often found in regulated industries such as biotech, pharmaceutical, medical device and to a lesser extent financial services. (Now if this were a podcast, I'd play that western gunfight whistle as two dusty cowboys fingered their holsters and spit tobacco.) Why? Because these industries have big fat government regulations sitting on top of them. Before I get a bunch of emails from government types, I said regulations not regulators.

Let's take the FDA regulated life sciences industries for a second. The majority of the regulations are really meant to ensure drug safety and efficacy. (In other words, they don't want anyone dying on their watch.) But the departmental issues that can bubble up between IT and the Quality group responsible for audit oversight have more to do with a lack of understanding of what each other does than anything else. Sometimes it can be as simple as the IT systems are designed in a vacuum first, especially for a younger company, and then everything has to be redone after the company has moved on to the phase of its lifecycle requiring FDA compliance. It's a pay me now or pay me later scenario with the QA person standing there with her hand out and the IT person pretending he's got dust in his eye and has temporarily been rendered blind.

Sometimes the real issue is paperwork. Happy audits need happy audit trails. (Regrets once again that this blog isn't a music filled podcast) IT people hate! hate! hate! filling out paperwork. I mean, have you ever read about an IT person winning the Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes? But a QA person can get overly paperwork happy as well without really understanding the processes that IT people deal with. This is usually because they come from a manufacturing background, which is often more cut and dry thanks to GMP regulations. But they won't back down from a well-documented process because it’s their butt in a sling. The result is departmental distrust, inconsistent processes, doing things twice, and worse, risks to the audit. All kidding aside, failed audits can lead to things from fines to really bad publicity to problems in drug development or manufacturing and thus a danger to the public. And that ain't good.

So if Good Manufacturing Practice is what's making the QA people a little "inflexible," why not work with that instead of against it? Why not Good Systems Practice too? The FDA wants you to pass an audit but they don't give you too much help in how. Companies develop their own system (if at all) and in bigger companies it can vary from department to department. So the not-invented-here syndrome comes into play. Good Systems Practice, which is based on the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), can help both sides be on the same side. It can look at all the company's business requirements (which includes the regulatory side) and build in best practices that meet the audit requirements with the right amount of paperwork, not the right mound of paperwork.

The latest version of ITIL (V3) is due to arrive in the Spring with complementary guides focusing on specific industries (especially the regulated ones) in the future. It's not quite a cookbook but it certainly will go a long way in preventing the cooks from getting out the sharp knives.

For a more detailed white paper on this subject, email me at blog@csdg.com.

The Marketing Maven
(and no, that's not me with the boxing gloves on. Mine are blue.)

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GMP, GLP why not GSP?....Gee, I don't know!

2007-01-15T13:24:00.001-03:00

Happy New Year! New Year's is usually a time for resolutions. I don't believe in those, if something needs to be changed, why wait a whole year to do it, especially since you'll break it in two days anyway. (Probably because you were very…..tired….when you made it in the first place.)

But in some cases, the new year is a good time for a fresh start. So with that in mind, Court Square in the Round would like to tell you about something the company is always taking about and that is Good Systems Practice or GSP. We believe GSP is a fresh approach to IT Service Management, especially in regulated industries. It has become our mantra. No, we haven't had any employees sitting around the lobby in the lotus position, burning incense and chanting GeeeSsssssPeeee. (Really. I just checked. Besides, I think it is against the fire code.) But it has become a critical piece of the way we support our clients and help them establish an IT environment that supports their business goals and audit requirements. It helps IT add value to the business so that the CFO doesn't get out the red pen to slash the budget once again.

What is GSP? It all started a few years ago when we were talking about how our pharmaceutical customers have the FDA mandating disciplined approaches to segments of their business such as GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice), GLP (Good Laboratory Practice and GCP (Good Clinical Practice). Someone in the room (I think it was the CEO and for the sake of totally sucking up, let's just say it was the CEO) wondered out loud why no one at the FDA had ever gotten around to doing the same for IT, since so much of all of those other processes are tied together by IT and all the data generated is so critical. We'd been supporting pharma for years with a methodology that mirrored ITIL, which was just beginning to catch on in the US. So, why not propose it as a Good Systems Practice?

As an aside, I read an interesting take on the difference between ISO and ITIL the other day. I was googling around looking for other people's take on it and found it on a message board of all places. I can't give proper quote credit because I think the person's screen name was ILUVITIL or something like that but basically they said that ISO makes sure that you do what you say you are doing but ITIL makes sure what you are doing is right in the first place.

It all starts with aligning IT with the business goals, which the newest version of ITIL (V3) is moving toward. It builds like layers of a pyramid. Best practices from ITIL and the Project Management Institute create the foundation. The processes and procedures are layered on top of that, with a focus on Service Level Agreements (SLAs). It is only then that automated tools come into play. Too many people jump right to tools. But just like the pyramid, the middle layer does not belong on the bottom. That's an expensive way to fail because you just get to see your bad processes in action that much faster. Sort of like a really ineffective closing pitcher coming in during the second inning. After you implement your tools, train your people and start monitoring your progress. It sounds easy right? OK, it's not easy but it is easy to follow.

We decided to share this with others in the pharmaceutical industry to see if we could gain some traction adopting a standard methodology. Pharmaceutical Technology published a "call to arms" by our CEO in 2005. I really wanted to have a picture of him on a horse waving a sword or something but we didn't have a horse in the supply closet. (The scary thing is we did have a sword.) My second choice was the blue paint and kilt from Braveheart but in the end we settled for a typical corporate headshot. Luckily, the call to arms was greeted with a very positive response anyway. As it turns out, there is a group composed of members of the FDA, pharmaceutical companies and service providers like us who are looking to do the same thing. So, we are thrilled to be participating with them.

Since that time, we've been invited to speak at various events on GSP including the latest FDAnews conference. It's exciting and we hope you will join us. We've got information on tools and whitepapers on our corporate website at www.csdg.com Or if you don't find what you need, just email me at blog@csdg.com and I'll send you the pyramid or a GSP maturity model to help you gauge where you are today. (As it relates to GSP, I can't help you with your personal level of maturity. Although maybe we'll make that an end of year blog.)

One more thing, we've trademarked GSP and Good Systems Practice so feel free to use it with proper credit. The penalty for failure to do this is being strapped to an uncomfortable office chair with an ipod secured to your head and the playlist selected by a group of teenagers.

Stay tuned to more on the subject, including discussing how IT and Quality can get along better after GSP. We'll call it the IT versus Quality Celebrity Death Match.

The Marketing Maven

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Hello the House!

2006-12-11T13:07:00.000-03:00

Court Square Data Group, Inc. is leaping into the blogosphere (OK, we're putting our toe in the water) with this new blog. We hope you visit us often.

First, the necessary company background details. Yeah, I know this part is as exciting as the reading of the rules during the Academy Awards followed by the introduction of the suits from Price Waterhouse (oops, there goes any links from the PWC blog) but it is important that you know who we are and where we are coming from.

Court Square is a managed service company also providing IT solutions for companies in transition. Our Good Systems Practice methodology combines an ITIL framework with PMI best practices.

Yes, I know that's alphabet soup but I promise you that unlike canned soup, our ideas do not have a high sodium content. We believe strongly in best practices as healthy for our industry. And we welcome your feedback on those ideas.

We've been alive and kicking since 1995 and now have offices in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey. We primarily service the northeast but have traveled globally on behalf of our clients. (Hey everyone, don't forget that after next month, you need a passport to get back into the US. Although there are a few of my colleagues that I hope do forget. Just kidding…..Maybe)

Why Court Square in the Round? It isn't because we have some kind of obsession with geometric shapes. "In the Round" in Shakespearean theater days meant the audience was all around the players. Now this meant that sometimes the audience didn't get the best viewpoint, but at the very least they got a different perspective. And we hope that is what we can offer with this blog. No, not a view of the back of my head but different perspectives about what is going on either within IT best practices or more specifically, how they relate to our target market segments of life sciences, financial services or manufacturing. We'll also talk about what we think is working in those industries and what isn't.

We'll try to keep you informed not only of our activities at shows and conferences but also important industry events. We'll also throw in some unrelated fun stuff in the calendar because while at Court Square we take our work very seriously, we try not to take ourselves very seriously.

So what exactly do we do? We specialize in projects and managed services supporting a company's IT infrastructure. Everything behind the applications, the brains of your company's IT environment. No, we don't support simple desktop stuff like if you find that your printer is jammed and you can't get your resume to come out right. You shouldn't be doing that on company time anyway.

I mentioned earlier that we provide IT solutions for companies in transition. I always get asked "what do you mean by transition?" It's not transition like a butterfly metamorphous or anything or even serious transition like puberty. Company transition is just as important but without the drama, tears and rolling of the eyes. Hmmm, on second thought, maybe company transition is like puberty.

Transition is driven by business events or technology events. Our clients are usually experiencing the pain of a merger where the two systems don't talk to each other. Or a divestiture where all of a sudden they have to disconnect from the corporate mothership. Other business transition drivers include rapid growth when your startup takes off or you've got a new product that is ready to launch so your actual sales can match that hockey stick forecast you showed your CFO.

The toughest area of transition that our clients face is regulatory issues. You know where you have some government regulation sitting on your industry that requires an auditor who may have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed to come in and assess your IT environment. This is common in life sciences with the FDA regulations or financial services who have the FDIC or FFIEC knocking on their door. And a whole bunch of companies are worried about SOX. (I don't mean the Red Sox. The only thing I worry about there is being able to afford a $25 Fenway Frank if they sign Daisuke Matsuzaka for $50M.) Sarbanes-Oxley impacts more than just public companies and many companies are not prepared for that. (And believe it or not, companies are spending more each year trying to comply. Shouldn’t the costs be going down by now?)

Court Square doesn't care about the type of regulation. To us, working in a regulated industry is just another business process. But we understand that some companies need help. And that's why we're here.

Other drivers of transition include the need to migrate from a legacy platform to something more modern than a Model T. Or maybe your infrastructure is too bloated from the Y2K party and you need to consolidate your servers or data centers. Take a look at your capacity and see if there's room to save money and space. Or let us do it for you. The bottom line is companies staff for day-to-day. They don't staff for big events. We LIVE for those. Have tux, will travel.

The other side of our coin is managed services. We'll take over some or all of your infrastructure. We'll do it onsite or we'll do it remotely if you don't want to see our shining faces every day. We can manage your infrastructure from across the street or across the country. It's all about Good Systems Practice. But we recognize that some companies may not be ready for GSP right out of the gate. Sort of like "Hello, how are you, let's get married." That's OK, we'll talk to you about your business needs and figure it out together.

Well, that's it for the intro. If you're still reading, thanks for sticking with us. We'll take a break for the holidays and come back to talk to you again in January. We want to talk to you about things like

Server Consolidation: Don't be afraid of the dark
IT in Regulated Environments: Stop the audit, I want to get off.
IT Engineers versus Quality Engineers: Celebrity Death Match.

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about us, you can check out our super serious corporate website at www.csdg.com. We're growing like crazy and are always looking for new hires so if you want to live and work in the northeast, send a resume to employment@csdg.com

A safe and prosperous New Year to you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

The Marketing Maven

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