Assessing the Foundation: A Data Management Current-State Review for a Global Marketing Organization.

About the Client

Company B’s Pharmaceutical Group Strategic Marketing (PGSM) organization supported the company’s pharmaceutical business with market research, competitive intelligence, strategic data analysis and epidemiology, health economics, and pricing — the information-intensive functions responsible for giving brand and business teams the evidence they needed to make sound strategic and operating decisions. As a roughly 200-person worldwide organization feeding decisions across Company B’s pharmaceutical portfolio, PGSM’s information practices exerted outsized influence on the quality and speed of decisions made well beyond its own walls.

Industry Context

By the early 2000s, pharmaceutical marketing organizations were under growing pressure to justify product decisions with rigorous, timely evidence, as competitive intelligence, health economics, and outcomes data played an increasingly central role in launch planning and portfolio strategy. At the same time, many pharmaceutical marketing functions had grown organically over years of product launches and reorganizations, leaving behind fragmented processes and systems for managing the data, information, and knowledge those functions depended on. Enterprise knowledge management frameworks that evaluated an organization across strategy, content, process, people, and technology were gaining traction industry-wide as a way to diagnose exactly that kind of fragmentation before committing to a fix.

Current Situation

PGSM’s executive team chartered a business unit-wide improvement initiative to redesign the business processes and upgrade the systems involved in acquiring, categorizing, analyzing, synthesizing, storing, retrieving, and disseminating the organization’s marketing data, information, and knowledge, recognizing that better data, information, and knowledge management were the foundation for better strategic and operating decisions. A worldwide vice president was named project sponsor, and the organization’s head of information technology was chosen as project leader. That leader quickly determined that the organization lacked the in-house people, data, and knowledge management expertise to complete the project successfully, and engaged Iknow for the assignment.

• Widespread process inefficiency across a large marketing organization. Many of PGSM’s internal business processes and practices for handling marketing data, information, and knowledge were grossly inefficient.
• Inconsistent information quality and speed. Five information-intensive functions — market research, competitive intelligence, strategic data analysis, health economics, and pricing — struggled to deliver accurate, timely information to their internal customers.
• No in-house data and knowledge management expertise. The organization’s project leader had neither the people nor the specialized expertise in-house to run a data and knowledge management assessment of this scope.
• No current picture of information flow. No documented view existed of how information and knowledge actually flowed into, out of, and within the marketing organization.

• Conduct a current-state assessment across five core dimensions: strategy, content, processes, people and organization, and technology.
• Capture input from both internal customers of the marketing organization and the marketing staff who acquire, analyze, and disseminate information.
• Compare the current state against leading practices from strategic marketing functions at other companies.
• Develop an implementation roadmap of prioritized projects to close the identified gaps.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around a five-dimension current-state assessment framework — strategy, content, processes, people and organization, and technology — followed by a gap analysis against leading practices and synthesis into an overall strategy and roadmap, reflecting Iknow’s KM assessment and maturity benchmarking methodology.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Two-audience interview design. Iknow developed detailed interview guides tailored to two distinct stakeholder groups: internal customers of the marketing organization, and the marketing staff involved in acquiring, analyzing, and disseminating information.
• Stakeholder interviews. Iknow conducted 27 interviews with key stakeholders across both groups, using their input to build a current-state snapshot of the organization.
• Current-state process flowcharting. Iknow prepared flowcharts of current business processes, giving the organization a visual, shared reference for how work actually happened.
• Gap analysis against leading practice. Iknow compared the documented current state against leading practices drawn from strategic marketing functions at other companies, surfacing significant improvement opportunities across all five dimensions.
• Strategy synthesis and roadmap development. Iknow synthesized its interview findings into an overall strategy and defined 12 projects as part of an implementation roadmap to improve the marketing organization’s capabilities.
• Deliverable development. Iknow produced supporting deliverables including mission and vision statements for the Market Research and Strategic Data Analysis and Epidemiology (SDA&E) functions, a stakeholder and user class inventory tied to the New Product Development/Commercial Pre-Planning Process (NPD/CP3), an internal customer requirements summary, and current- and future-state information flow diagrams.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor, working under the sponsorship of a worldwide vice president and directly with the marketing organization’s head of information technology, who served as project leader, along with the internal customers and marketing staff who participated in the interview program.

Assessing a Large, Multi-Function Organization in Under Two Months

With five distinct information-intensive functions and roughly 200 people to account for, a shallow assessment risked missing the real sources of inefficiency behind an already tight timeline. Iknow addressed this by developing separate, purpose-built interview guides for internal customers and marketing staff, then conducting 27 targeted interviews that captured both how information was being requested and how it was actually being produced.

Turning a Broad Diagnostic Into an Actionable Roadmap

A five-dimension assessment covering strategy, content, process, people, and technology could easily have produced a long, undifferentiated list of gaps with no clear starting point. Iknow addressed this by synthesizing its findings into a single overall strategy and defining 12 specific, scoped projects as an implementation roadmap, giving the organization a sequence of concrete initiatives rather than an abstract diagnosis.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Scope of assessment: A 200-person worldwide marketing organization assessed across five functions.
• Stakeholder engagement: 27 stakeholder interviews conducted across two distinct audience groups.
• Assessment framework: Five core dimensions evaluated: strategy, content, processes, people and organization, and technology.
• Roadmap delivered: 12 projects defined as part of the implementation roadmap.
• Engagement duration: Under two months.

Qualitative Outcomes

In less than two months, the marketing organization completed a comprehensive assessment of its current strengths and weaknesses and developed a strategic roadmap to improve its data and knowledge management capabilities. With that solid foundation in place, the company was able to launch many of the 12 proposed projects quickly, evidence that the assessment translated into real organizational momentum rather than a report that sat on a shelf. The current- and future-state information flow diagrams and customer requirements summary also gave the organization a shared, evidence-based language for a set of processes that had previously been understood only informally.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the full current-state assessment, gap analysis, strategy, and 12-project roadmap within the engagement’s less-than-two-month timeline, and the marketing organization began launching proposed projects quickly once the roadmap was in hand.

Core Skills

• KM and data management current-state assessment
• Cross-functional stakeholder interviews
• Strategic roadmap development
• Marketing information and knowledge flow analysis

Methods & Frameworks

• Five-dimension maturity framework (strategy, content, process, people and organization, technology)
• Gap analysis against leading practice
• Current- and future-state information flow diagramming

Technologies & Tools

• Marketing data and information systems landscape review