Pharma IT

Challenging pharmaceutical manufacturers everywhere, every day are the myriad issues surrounding the acquisition, disposition and analysis of the huge amounts of data their operations create around the clock. Any Pharma producer worth its salt these days is likely investing a great deal of time, resources and effort to create or maintain a comprehensive information technology (IT) infrastructure to support compliant operations, process quality and efficiency, and ultimately assure product safety, effectiveness and affordability.
According to research firm Computer Economics, which provides benchmarking metrics to aid IT operations management, life science organizations have some unique attributes. In its study, “Comparative Analysis of IT Spending in the Life Sciences,” Computer Economics compared high-level spending metrics for life science companies against a broad sample of organizations in all industries. The study delivered four key findings:

• Life science companies have high IT intensity. They spend considerably more than the composite sample, as measured by total IT spending per user and spending as a percentage of revenue.
• Life science companies spend a higher portion of their IT budgets on data center and network infrastructure than the average company, and they spend a correspondingly smaller portion on business application software.
• The size of the application support staff and spending on application software per user is typical, indicating that high data center and network infrastructure costs are the factors that drive IT spending in this sector.
• The staffing mix for life science companies is similar to other organizations. IT staffing headcount, therefore, can be benchmarked against similar-size organizations from all sectors.