Before You Can Manage It, You Have to Find It: A Knowledge Audit for a Pharmaceutical Scientific Affairs Organization.

About the Client

Company J’s Scientific Affairs function is responsible for creating and disseminating medical and clinical information across all of the Company’s numerous therapeutic areas.

Industry Context

Pharmaceutical Scientific and Medical Affairs functions sit at the intersection of clinical, regulatory, and commercial activity, translating clinical and scientific evidence into information physicians and internal stakeholders can act on. As these organizations scale — with field liaisons, contact centers, and medical communications and education groups all producing and consuming similar content — they often accumulate large volumes of medical and clinical knowledge across disconnected systems, lacking a shared taxonomy or metadata standard, making search, reuse, and consistency genuinely difficult. Because Scientific Affairs content is frequently subject to regulatory and compliance scrutiny, having full visibility into what knowledge assets exist and who owns them is not just an efficiency matter but a compliance and audit-readiness concern, making a rigorous knowledge audit a natural first step before any content management technology investment.

Current Situation

This Knowledge Audit project was undertaken to provide a foundation for improving overall access to and sharing of knowledge within the Scientific Affairs function. To manage knowledge effectively, the organization needed to know what it had, where it was, where it came from, who controlled it, and how it was transformed as it moved through the company’s business processes. The Knowledge Audit was conducted as the initial step in creating a Scientific Affairs-specific content architecture and taxonomy for an enterprise content management system.

• Fragmented information across many venues and channels. Scientific Affairs collected information from many venues and channels — SALs, the Customer Contact Center, the Medical Communications Group, and the Medical Education Group — with no unified view of what knowledge existed across them.
• No documented view of the organization’s knowledge assets. Scientific Affairs did not have a documented understanding of what knowledge assets it had, where they lived, where they came from, who controlled them, or how they moved through business processes.
• No standardized content architecture or taxonomy. No content architecture or taxonomy existed to standardize content types, metadata, and vocabulary across the department’s many databases and tools.
• No foundation for a future ECMS investment. Scientific Affairs needed a rigorous, foundational understanding of its knowledge assets before it could responsibly invest in an enterprise content management system.

• Conduct a comprehensive knowledge audit across all Scientific Affairs' major functional areas.
• Identify and describe the knowledge assets used by process owners, participants, and end-users in their jobs.
• Catalog and inventory knowledge assets in a structured, reusable format.
• Lay the foundation for a Scientific Affairs-specific content architecture and taxonomy for a future enterprise content management system.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around standardized data collection, a broad interview program spanning every major functional area, and structured cataloging of the results — reflecting Iknow’s knowledge audit and mapping methodology for building a genuine inventory of an organization’s knowledge before designing any new architecture around it.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Standardized data collection templates. Iknow developed standard data collection templates and interview guides, which were used consistently across all interviews.
• Interview documentation. Iknow prepared a detailed interview summary after each interview to preserve findings accurately.
• Cross-functional interview program. Iknow conducted individual and group interviews across all major functional areas with process owners, process participants, and end-users of process outputs to identify and describe the knowledge assets they used in their jobs.
• SOP collection and review. Iknow collected and reviewed the available standard operating procedures for the department’s key functional areas.
• Structured knowledge asset cataloging. Iknow cataloged and stored the information about each knowledge asset in a custom Microsoft Access database, organized into 15 categories aligned with the department’s major functional areas.
• Input/output classification. Iknow classified each of the more than 700 inventoried knowledge assets as either a process input or a process output.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow served as prime contractor, engaging more than 80 Scientific Affairs personnel as process owners, process participants, and end-users across 15 functional areas throughout the interview and documentation program.

Building a Consistent Picture Across 15 Functional Areas and 80-Plus People

With more than 80 people spread across 15 distinct functional areas, an inconsistent interview approach risked producing a fragmented, incomparable set of findings rather than a genuine organization-wide inventory. Iknow addressed this by developing standard data collection templates and interview guides used uniformly across all interviews, then cataloging every knowledge asset in a single custom Access database with a consistent structure.

Turning a Long List of Assets Into a Foundation for Future Architecture

Simply compiling a long list of knowledge assets would have left Scientific Affairs with more information but no clearer path toward a content architecture. Iknow addressed this by classifying every asset as either a process input or output and organizing the full inventory into 15 categories aligned with the department’s real functional structure, giving the knowledgebase the structure needed to directly inform taxonomy and content architecture decisions.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Stakeholder engagement: More than 80 department personnel involved in the Knowledge Audit.
• Knowledge assets cataloged: More than 700 individual knowledge assets collected, described, and inventoried.
• Functional coverage: 15 functional categories established, spanning areas from Clinical Operations to Trial Methodology.
• Follow-on projects enabled: Content Architecture, Help/FAQs, Templates Redesign, and Knowledge Governance.
• Engagement duration: Four-month assignment.

Qualitative Outcomes

In roughly four months, Scientific Affairs had a comprehensive inventory of its business processes, standard operating procedures, and intermediate and final process outputs. This knowledgebase served as the foundation for four follow-on projects: standardizing content types, metadata, and vocabulary across the department’s databases and tools; building end-user help and self-service materials, including knowledge-sharing programs and a monthly newsletter; creating a department-wide templates repository; and developing optimal knowledge governance policies and practices. That range of follow-on work is evidence the audit became the springboard for a genuinely broader knowledge management transformation rather than a standalone deliverable.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the full knowledge audit and knowledgebase within the four-month engagement, and that knowledgebase directly enabled four distinct follow-on initiatives spanning content architecture, end-user support, templates, and governance.

Core Skills

• Knowledge audit and mapping
• Taxonomy and content architecture design
• Business process and SOP documentation
• Knowledge governance program design

Methods & Frameworks

• Standardized interview and data collection templates
• Input/output knowledge asset classification
• Functional-area-based categorization

Technologies & Tools

• Custom Microsoft Access knowledge asset database
• Enterprise content management system (ECMS) foundation work